Milly Thompson has just visited the studio. As usual I talked through my older work and then moved on to the newer pieces I have been doing at Standpoint. She felt that what I (maybe the work) projected most of all was a grappling with the guilt of painting, something common around painters, after all it makes little sense to paint as a contemporary artist, and yet for so many of us it is the driving force.
She was fantastic with being harshly critical about my work in places of our talk. She was especially critical of Clout which is perhaps the piece of work that I have been known for. She felt that this work could easily be misread and taken as a gimmick and seen too much as being isolated and ‘liked’ by people because it has an sign/image that they recognise. She also felt that the new work is far to close to a cheap and nasty poster manipulated on CAD and sold to be pretty on the wall. Something that pulled me up short. She felt that the work was more successful when i became both less referential and less reverential to the original paintings. she felt this was closest with one of the newer works where i had broken free of the figure and the edge.
in terms of moving on, she stressed repeatedly several things. Firstly the absurdity for making rules for myself for work, that make for a practice that has a project based mentality rather than a holistic approach. She thinks making things so logical holds me back somewhat and is almost certainly right. The rules if they need to exist should only be there to get things started. She thinks I should take a year off from being logical and felt the most logical thing for my practice is to be illogical for a big space of time; to let things happen rather than predetermining them. She felt with this then my work could really go somewhere, but at the moment is too often stifled.
We talked a lot of the relevance of painting and how I should focus on perhaps the most pertinent reason to be painting at the moment; that if it being a place where one can slow down and retreat from the business and bustle of the everyday contemporary world. She felt that maybe I should really retreat from the world of twitter, Google and mobile phones when in the studio. This was made in response to me telling her that I do not drive and that because i walk everywhere then I see things that might normally be passed over if one was traveling at speed. She felt more than anything that my work and a painting practice allows for a slowing down. This also makes logical sense in an illogical way of my feeling towards work such as Clout and Various Titles and how I am now more interested in making selections from these than displaying the mass as I have previously done.
Finally she feels that I should focus on being a painter more, letting myself do what I want to do with paint, rather than thinking of others, or a theoretical response to the validity/death of painting. I am conscious that I am far far away from a Stuckist attitude to painting and I am uneasy with the recent revival in purely abstract paintings, but letting the paint and gesture come to the fore could make the work become more personable and more interesting. She pointed out that it took two hours for me to talk about the activity of painting, when I said how i have achieved a gestural mark with gouache paint and felt I should let this come out far more often. Can I get over the guilt of that though and would I be happy with it?
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