Hot Flesh – Meaty rich colour.
Along side paint ‘Mr Vovk’ I have began to add colour to my large canvas.
At the same time I have been researching the work of Hyman Bloom – He painted autopsies – flesh in a in-between state. Human flesh transforming into meat – no different than butchered animals. Bacon once said he was always surprised when he went to a butchers that it wasn’t him hanging up- that it could be so easily him. He was drawing the age old comparison of meat and flesh in painting. From looking at Bloom’s autopsy works I now understand this statement. ‘The Hull’, 1952 I have always mistaken to be depicting a pile of meat – I guess in a sense it is. We are all made of the same stuff. It is not just the ‘human condition’ it is the animal condition.
The colour palette of ‘The Hull’ was clearly infiltrating my thinking at this stage of painting.
All this imagery brings me back to a couple of pages in my sketchbook where I responded to the colour palette of meat and the bones that protrude from that flesh. These were also experiments into the varying textures that can be made with oil paint and likened to meaty flesh and bone.
It was at this point, I decided that I had to apply my paint every other day rather than continuously because I intended to get a variation of , weight, texture and a sense of layering.
The form of the figure is starting to come together…But at this point there was still a very long way to go!
