Paint and the Self

I was invited by the University of the Arts London alumni association to go to my old college, Central St Martin’s, yesterday to make drawings for a project they’re doing called ‘Mapping the Move’. The college will be moving to brand new premises next year, and people have realised that there will be a massive loss involved, namely of the Southampton Row building, which in many ways is quite the loveliest building I know.

So, along with about eight other people I turned up yesterday morning with some drawing things. After a very brief introduction, we were left to go our separate ways within the building. My first visit since I left, I think. What an experience… I expected to find it interesting, not to be completely overwhelmed, as I was, with great raw gushes of emotion! I don’t even know what it was all about; I think I’ll be musing on this and trying to unpick it all for quite a while.

My time at Central was really mixed. I chose to go there initially because I loved the building, and I wanted to be in the very middle of London. And there was an awareness that my grandfather (who died before I was born) had taught lithography there for a time, so I suppose I felt some kind of sense of familial connection, however tenuous. Oh, and I’d seen one of the tutors on a TV programme about artists, which had impressed me greatly (and in fact he turned out to be probably the only tutor there that I think I ever really got any useful teaching from).

I found myself focusing on small details: stained and cracked corners of beautifully-laid floors, original glass which had gently shifted shape over the decades causing the view of the Sicilian Avenue opposite to meld and shimmer, gracefully curling handles of window fastenings that over the years that had stood many sessions of painting and repainting, the cone-shaped metal pitcher in the etching room covered with layers of dripped straw-hat varnish. And the big, grand statements of architectural splendour: the stone window seats, the vaulted stone ceilings, the elegant windows, the stunning stairwells. I watched students amble around the corridors chatting, just as I had, and mucking about in the computer room. They stood around on landings speaking into their mobile phones and gave every impression of taking the place for granted, just as we had. I think I had felt the building to be a kind of supporting mother, absorbing its children’s expectations and hopes, and it spilled some of them back to me yesterday.

The archive wants to keep all the drawings made. I don’t think much of my little sketches, but I may well work into or from them in some way. As well as drawing, I took a lot of photos on my phone. Why on earth didn’t I take a proper camera – I don’t seem to have a sensible way of getting photos off the phone at the moment, or I’d show you some. I think that sometimes (no, often) a photograph can be a lot better than a drawing, though there’s a lot to be said for going through the process of making a drawing, it really is a unique way of looking and reflecting on what you’re seeing. At one point I became transfixed by a bundle of orange wires streaming through a clumsily knocked soot-black hole on their journey between one room and another, high up in the corner of a hallway. It evoked all sorts of thoughts about the nature of things hidden and exposed, and about changing situations. The wires led to the computer room, which had been the 2^nd year painting studio when I was there.

I felt absolutely drained afterwards.

I went to a meeting last night which was organised by someone from firstsite (visual arts organisation). The aim of the meeting was to keep artists up-to-date with their plans for developing their artists’ support programme, and to invite comments and suggestions. We heard about a short-residency series in Hastings some years ago, which sounds wonderful… The artists doing these short residencies were expected to do something that would move their practice on in some way, doing something new and different. I found myself daydreaming about what I might come up with, given a few days in such a space… I had a taste of it in December when I was part of a firstsite project called ’15 artists, 15 days’ and found it really did move my practice on; that was just a single day, so imagine a series of four or five days… What would I do? This week I keep having a mental image of paintings/drawings on huge sheets of translucent paper hanging across a space, so that people move between and round them…

One of the unanticipated side-effects of doing this blog has been that I often read the other artists’ blogs too, some of which are really interesting and thought-provoking. I’ve just been reading Judith Alder’s blog this morning, and I’m reminded of how enriching it can be for me as a painter to connect with the work of artists who work in other media. Maybe one day I’ll even find myself collaborating with another artist, imagine that…

Okay, now I’ll head off to the studio to see what happened yesterday in there with ink and charcoal. It seemed to be working at the point when I left it, but looking at it with fresh eyes could be painful. Or exciting, of course – I must keep hopeful!

For various reasons I haven’t been in the studio making work this past week, and I miss it.

On Tuesday I drove 23 paintings to south London for a solo exhibition. There was no-one at the gallery to hang the work, and their hanging system is bizarre: lines hanging down from a high rail, to which hooks are attached. Endless fiddling is required to get the lines in the right place, and the pictures level. I hurt my knee recently, and it means that going up and down ladders is not easy at the moment, so I was really glad to be accompanied by Daisy, the current intern from firstsite, whose help was invaluable. This is one way that regional arts organisations can really help artists – just by putting them in touch with people who can assist in practical one-off situations like this. I had a bit of a panic early on because it looked as though I’d brought far too few paintings; but actually an exhibition generally looks better with more space between the works, and it turned out to be just right – phew!

On Thursday I went back for the opening, which wasn’t as well attended as I’d have liked because it turned out the gallery hadn’t sent out personal invitations other than advertising it in their brochure. Moral: be careful where you show, and make sure the gallery does their bit! To be fair, it’s a venue which gets used by a lot of people (so the work will be seen, which is bound to be better than having it stored in the studio) and their commission is low, but I think that in future I’ll be careful to check the details of what a gallery does and doesn’t offer to do.

Actually I think I’m probably just grumpy because I have moved on a long way from most of the work that’s on show in this exhibition, and my concerns and love are now in the body of work I’m currently engaged with. I’m going to get into the studio now…

On a whim (meaning: not working on any of the three studio projects I feel I ‘ought’ to be working on…), I thought today I’d try something new: drawing in a concertina-style sketchbook directly from film stills. This was inspired by a video on YouTube of a dance piece called ‘Faun’. The two dancers have extraordinary fluidity and strength to their movements. I also love the sturdy muscularity of their bodies.

My paintings and drawings never usually take photos as a starting-point, but when I went to see Jenny Saville’s reproduction drawings series at Gagosian recently, I felt that she’d probably used photography as a part of the drawing process, and it had worked really well. Saville’s work had a sort of true inner muscularity to it, a sort of integrity and authenticity that I don’t often detect when an artist has used a photograph.

Today’s work is not to be compared with Saville’s, for lots of reasons including the fact that it’s on a much, much smaller scale. I’m interested in what I’ve done though; maybe it’s the start of something…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKWXFoLqYeg&feature…

A long and probably ultimately fruitless day in the studio today, wrestling with the acrylics… How anyone gets it to work is beyond me! Two major issues: (1) trying to get the ‘stuff’ to work, the physicality of it all (‘the alchemy’ as James Elkins might say); (2) the big ongoing struggle which is always so intrinsic to my work: the struggle of working on the edge where a kind of emotive beauty meets something more visceral, raw and edgy. (The kind of emotive beauty I’m thinking about here lies in an appealing face, for example, perhaps with a soft expression.)

Your strength can also be your weakness. In my case, the ability to draw a face in a certain way. The thing is, I do want my work to express aspects of human physicality, imbued with the emotional and (dare I say) spiritual qualities that we can infer when we look at it. On the other hand, there’s the danger of the work being ‘sweet’ and even pretty. I am conscious that I am really working on the edge of sweetness a lot of the time, and this I find invigorating, infuriating and really challenging. Quite often I seem to dramatically visualise it in my mind (remembering school geography lessons) as an arête, a knife-edged ridge. The path meanders, so you have to keep checking you are following the ridge exactly, being constantly careful not to slither down into sentimentality/prettiness on the one side, or – or what on the other? Loads of risks there too, ranging from brutishness to blandness to meaningless gesture to you-name-it. The other thing about ‘sweetness’ for me involves colour. The moment you move beyond monochrome black-and-white, you get caught up in people’s assumptions and responses to colour. The vivid magentas I often use – to me they speak of vigour, but to some people it’s prettily pink. And to others, these colours are simply distasteful. (To me too, sometimes! – I loved Thomas Hylander’s and Nick Goss’s subdued limited palettes in their paintings at the Jerwood art space, wondering for the nth time why I didn’t work this way…).

Of course, it’s all really subjective. There will be plenty of people who find my work distasteful because of the types of faces I tend to paint, or the colours I use. And my own views change over time, too. A lot of my past work now appals me… Which is probably as it should be. Keep moving on.