Tilted heads…
When I had a break from blogging I had just mentioned I had started a curved neck portrait (Head Tilted I). I have since worked on this and started another painting from the same series of photographs.
I don’t think either of these paintings are finished at this point but I will continue to work on them over the next two weeks.
The first in its beginning stages retained a tension to the neck – a muscular quality which reminded me of some art works talked about in the John Sheeran lecture on the Masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance. I feel this is lost slightly now but the physical qualities of the paint replace it with something else.
The exposure of the neck in both these paintings and earlier paintings (Trapped Flesh I & II) communicate a vulnerability to me now.
My flesh, my subject vulnerable to the scraping and slashing of paint on my palette knife and brush. Desperate – surrendering to my mark making ? There is also something deformed and melting about this flesh which reminded me of Mason Verger out of the film Hannibal.
The second painting Head Tilted II felt like a poignant image to paint for the feeling of been trapped again. The head is looking up – towards the light. Looking for a way out like at the bottom of a big pit.
In comparison to the first the painting it is more flat – less textured.
There is a deadness and stillness in the subject echoed in my muted colour palette. This is however contrasted by the life and intent of the marks.
It is like my directional mark makings are going up – magnetised towards the top of the canvas like the tilted head. They are short quick marks like a staccato note in music.
In this sense the subject both contrast and work in dualism with each other. This is something I wrote about in my dissertation. This quote from my dissertation is in the context of Francis Bacon’s work Painting, 1946.
“Fading flesh and materiality of the paint are reflected within one another. The paint parts and breaks in the same way as the depicted flesh, showing marks and layers underneath. This awakens the observer to the notion of destructible, torn flesh and, in doing so, evokes the reality of humanity from this period – severed limbs, flayed flesh, incinerated bodies, the scream of pain and death.” (Berry, 2014, p.7).
For the process of this painting I first applied acrylic and then oil. Tonally with little texture. I feel this is may become a study for a painting further down the line where the paint will be used differently again. I can then see the change that has on the reading of the paint.
