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?
