Quotes from Skinning the Paint by Emily Braun, a key text in contextualising my project. I will reflect back on this and try and more clearly pair parts of this text with my work.
‘In the history of art, Titian was the first to have made the stroke of the brush palpably akin to the substance of flesh. Translucent yet dense, the consistency of oil paint appeared to breathe with the opaque luminosity of human skin. Titian modeled the masses and swells of the body with touches of broken colour that retained their independent vitality as gestural marks on the picture plane.’
‘Titian placed the figures uncomfortably close to the front of the picture space, creating a confrontation between flesh and viewer…’
‘Titian’s touch and Marsyas’s howl have distinct echoes in the work of British painters after World War II spanning three generations, from Francis Bacon to Jenny Saville. No other national school has been so obsessed with skinning the paint, with merging the depiction of carnality with the inherent properties of the pictorial medium.’
‘Bacon, Lucian Freud , Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff, Saville and Cecilly Brown – approach the canvas as a vital body of strokes that temporarily coalesce into the illusion of flesh, only to reveal the naked handling of coloured pigments across the picture plane. The analogy is extended when we consider that one skinning apparatus is none other than the knife, a tool that artists use to render scabrous and sentient the taut membrane of the canvas.’
‘Kossoff repeatedly applied the paint and scraped it off again, a skinning process that mimics the excoriation and regeneration of the epidermal layer.’
‘The eye grapple with skeins and blobs of brown, white, and red, and flounders between illegibility and uneasy recognition, between the loss and reassertion of the viewing self. In representing flesh, and with it in the human face or naked body these painters free themselves of conventional narrative and force the viewer to peruse the artist’s own deep looking and their physical responses with the brush, rag, sponge, paper and even hands. Making the paint work as flesh not like it, as Freud would have it , the canvas becomes a tactile, cutaneous subject, formed by layers of pigment subjected to peeling and surgical cuts and bearing all the organic traces of its making.
“Evidence accrues”, Auerbach admits; the eye gloms on every decision made and trauma inflicted during the images formation.’
‘…their works are filled with a piercing lyricism, the result of looking at and feeling the body from new (that is “other”) perspectives.’
