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.
