Masked Flesh
In my previous post you can see my painting progressing. The face was beginning to become quite mask like. this links back to the main themes of my project as well as introducing a few new ideas.
The vacuum packed meat – covered contained flesh – masking is a type of containing and covering.
It is as if the eyes on the face are set back from the rest of the flesh.
masks – early masked flesh – acrylic and charcoal on canvas.
The idea of a mask brings in ideas of identity.
In a talk done for guests of The Tate, Maggi Hambling comments on Bacon’s ‘Study for Portrait II (after the Life Mask of William Blake’ saying that although the subject is dead the paint makes it an alive painting – this relates back to my comment on Yan Pei-Ming’s ‘Gadaffi’s Corpse’.
Hambling also likens the application of paint to the application of make up.
http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/audio/dead-…
I think that in the way I have applied the paint on the face there is also ideas of covering something underneath which could be interpreted as make-up-like.
That damned hand…
Work on my large canvas was going well. I was painting every other day on areas-so that there was always a dryer area to work on – this kept painting flowing in the time scale.
One area that really got me hung up was one the hands/ wrist. Somethings work in a photograph because we know a photograph is taken directly from reality. A camera can’t make a mistake. Sometimes even if you paint something accurately it can appear wrong because it doesn’t look natural.
This is what I told myself whilst I battled with that damned hand!
I went through book after book looking at other depictions of hands and wrists to try and knock myself into a painting epiphany! An example being a page in ‘Paint’ by Jeffery Camp.
There were various stages where areas of the wrist or hand felt like bone and flesh – there was a sensation coming from the paint – but that was removed when your eye travelled up to an area which wasn’t working. It was a battle to try and fall in between paint which described bone, flesh – wrist and hand and paint that felt like it.
Hot Flesh – Meaty rich colour.
Along side paint ‘Mr Vovk’ I have began to add colour to my large canvas.
At the same time I have been researching the work of Hyman Bloom – He painted autopsies – flesh in a in-between state. Human flesh transforming into meat – no different than butchered animals. Bacon once said he was always surprised when he went to a butchers that it wasn’t him hanging up- that it could be so easily him. He was drawing the age old comparison of meat and flesh in painting. From looking at Bloom’s autopsy works I now understand this statement. ‘The Hull’, 1952 I have always mistaken to be depicting a pile of meat – I guess in a sense it is. We are all made of the same stuff. It is not just the ‘human condition’ it is the animal condition.
The colour palette of ‘The Hull’ was clearly infiltrating my thinking at this stage of painting.
All this imagery brings me back to a couple of pages in my sketchbook where I responded to the colour palette of meat and the bones that protrude from that flesh. These were also experiments into the varying textures that can be made with oil paint and likened to meaty flesh and bone.
It was at this point, I decided that I had to apply my paint every other day rather than continuously because I intended to get a variation of , weight, texture and a sense of layering.
The form of the figure is starting to come together…But at this point there was still a very long way to go!
Here is an up to date image of Mr Vovk. There are areas of the paint which really excite me but there are still areas I feel could be worked into more.
I added Liquin to my paint as I had left it out on cardboard over night – to draw out some oil. This worked a little too well and so I needed to bring back some of its oozey quality which means it moves into itself in a certain way on the canvas. The materiality of it remind me of De Kooning’s figurative ‘Woman Series’ e.g. ‘Woman in a Garden’, 1971.
The way the eyes have ended up looking takes me back to my visit to Emmerdale farm shop. Particularly a segment of vertebrae which had been vacuum packed – AGAIN THEMES OF TRAPPED FLESH- wrapped – contained – sealed. The flesh wrapped in plastic reminds me of the quality of my paint. The Liquin in the paint will make it appear to always be wet and so it glistens in the same way as this contained, red, meaty flesh.
I used a palette knife to cut and rearrange the paint – in areas scooping it up and repositioning it. It felt like the trauma placed on the subject was redelivered in my process. This fits well with this statement – ‘Kossoff repeatedly applied the paint and scraped it off again, a process that mimics the excoriation and regeneration of the epidermal layer’ – Braun, 2009.
This process was something I first came aware of in the building of my ‘No Woman, No Cry’ paintings.
In context of this painting I have re-looked at ‘Pause’, 2002-03 by Saville – a painting which emerged in the same way as ‘Mr Vovk’ – through appropriation of imagery.
I also looked at Yan Pei-Ming’s ‘Gaddafi’s Corpse’. The subject of Gaddafi’s dead flesh was one of the most painted appropriated images – 3 painters decided to paint it. Apparently painting the corpses of well known people is a trend I was not aware of…
http://uk.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2012/oct…
‘Gaddafi’s Corpse’, 2011 shows the gesture of the paint contradict the stillness of the subject. His paint is frozen in motion – especially the marks depicting the sky give a sensation of movement like the rest of the world continues to move. Even in reproduction the paint feels to me to breath. As a result the subject breaths too. Is this a painting of a dead body or has the use of active paint made the subject of this painting life ? and movement?
Mr Vovk painting
All the artist I looked at in my dissertation – Cecily Brown, Francis Bacon and Jenny Saville use various appropriation of imagery. Because of this knowledge I have has one eye open (in newspapers in particular) for bruised and battered flesh to relate to my imagery of meat and swollen flesh.
I saw Mr Vovk’s picture in this article and needed to paint him.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/u…
In my project I have always looked to my flesh as my subject hoping to draw from my own emotions and relationship with my subject – a kind of self awareness. So this of course, was a diversion from that. I saw it as an experiment to see how my work has developed how my language has changed. Will my emotive use of the materiality of paint be permanently attached to whatever subject I paint, no matter what my relationship?
I had not read the article when I painted the image I had only read the title and concentrated on the image – seeing the brutal, violent traces of the story on the subjects face I couldn’t help but attack the canvas with the same brutality.
This negativity and sensation of a fight – a battle dragged up emotions in myself and so I feel in a way I have inflicted a part of myself onto this flesh – onto the subject. This reminds me of ‘We Have to Eat’, 1986 by Arnaldo Roche-Rabell. It is almost the reverse of what I have done. It is in subject/ form a self portrait. It is the artist’s own face – “…it shows us what he looks like…” (Mark Scala, 2009) but the paint also describes a political and humanitarian statement “..of the plight Puerto Ricans…” (Scala, 2009).
In ‘Mr Vovk’ I used oil and white spirit to mark the canvas – the painting worked well at this stage even though it didn’t have the complexity of mark that I’m trying to achieve in my work at the moment.
I used the same palette as my ‘No Woman, No Cry’ triptych and applied the paint in the same way. Starting with alizarin crimson to bloody out the nose – swollen bags and eyelids and working in other colours.
