A few weeks ago I responded to the images of my swollen flesh. I was particularly interested in the fact that in this changed state my face had become a trace of my emotions. My emotions had temporarily scared the planes of my face. They had left their mark.
I was looking at these photographs and looking back was not what I usually see. It was still my flesh but so different.
I saw a kind of parallel to this and the process of painting. The idea of active paint being an external expression (through the paint and its sense of its subject) of the artist own emotions and ‘self’.
I proceeded to sketch and respond to these images.
I produced on canvas this painting. I decided that I wanted areas of it to be very physically similar to my flesh. When they were in this state my eyelids felt more dense than that area of flesh usually does.
I wanted to change my oil paint to coincide with that change in weight. BEES WAX is the way I did it ! My painting tutor gave me the ‘recipe’ and so I sourced some solid bees wax to melt and mix with white spirit. When mixed with my paint it made it more paste like. It completely changed my medium and the way it flowed on the canvas – as you would expect.
I also stained my canvas with ink and charcoal, building up scaring and a story to the ‘skin’ of the canvas. This something I have started to do religiously on my canvases through out this project.
Jenny Saville has been recorded as preparing her canvases ‘…with stains or transparent washes, a kind of chaotic undercoat…’
Example see ‘Aperture’, 2003.
Saville -“I start with the painting on the floor and throw paint, it’s almost like when they’re digging and find remnants of the past…It is like you’re putting history on the painting and then bringing the form out form that.”
Brutvan C.and Cullinan N.(2011) Jenny Saville RAW Exhibition held at Norton Museum of Art, Florida and Modern Art Oxford, 23 June – 16 September 2013 [exhibition catalogue].
The way I chose to do this varies. For this canvas I lay it down and pooled ink on to it and scratched and crumbled charcoal. It is only 38 x 30cms and I can happily sit above it and dominate it with my marks. Larger canvases usually get stained while pinned on a wall and so gravity pulls my washy marks towards the ground – a completely different beginning for the language of my painting.
I’m not sure why but I chose the colour palette of green and red. I’m aware that these are contrasting hot and cold colours but other than that I feel they are subconscious choice. Me simply absorbing what I have been looking at or feeling at the time. On reflection these colours remind me of aged steak. Dark and richly red flesh but riddled with shimmers of green blue and black.
