Painting the Ashes.

These two paintings are beginning to help coalesce my thinking. The garden with its trees are all around me and so provide a focus. If at all possible I want to fuse paint and subject, surface and space. A big painting is leaning against the wall and but the problem that I have with it is that using the ash as my starting point, my locus, and drawing in paint, the painting encourages too small marks ,which doesn't seem to be a problem in the drawings. Anyway, it will stand a lot of work yet and these two feel better, or at least I feel better about them. For now.

Working on the Red Ash, now in winter.

                                                             

I began looking at this back in the summer and since the autumn have made a number of drawings towards a new set of paintings. The paring down of the information as the tree sheds its foliage sets new problems in terms of space and picture surface. Looking at various texts today I found Martin Buber and this seemed appropriate:

Through all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition.But it can also happen,if will and grace are joined, that I am drawn into a relation and the tree ceases to be an IT. The power of exclusiveness has seized me. The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination,no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it, only differently.

SP @ 69

                                                            oil on canvas . 86x 44cm.

Although I often make a s.p. I do like to make one on or around a birthday and so this is this years. Each time it is different, elusive as always. I like to approach it as if for the first time and bring it through from chaos to some kind of resolution but of course as I am a plodder there are moments of utter chaos, panic and despair as the edifice crumbles and I try to save something from it. Working from the figure is not something that I am familiar with which makes it all the more interesting to do.

New work for the week past.Nothing to say but could try harder.

 

                                         

                        

     




                           

Last drawing of the year.

                                                


I thought a lot about drawing whilst I was away in England, three weeks is a long time. When I returned home I was able to continue drawing but this one is the last one made today. Drawing is such a physical and emotional engagement. The reciprocity which exists between the observer and the observed is there to be discovered, the disclosure self being disclosed in turn.

I think that a likeness is often hidden and it has to be encouraged out of itself and in drawing it does not always wear the same face, or rather the face is made as an image of itself, with patience, with determination, with love.

Although the above really was the last of the old year there was this other that preceded it.

A Happy New Year to all.

The disappearing subject part two.

Two pieces from a number of re- workings of the view from my workplace. The drawing is one of several that I have made and re-made and the painting has been underway at the same time: scraped off, repainted, over painted, scraped off etc. It remains a topographical painting and as such a disappointment because what I want is for the subject to be subsumed by the paint, to be painting first and painting last.




ink and emulsion on paper. 65x50cm                                               oil on canvas 30x30cm

It seems that in the process of working there are times when one comes near and then finds the whole thing to be elusive and all one can do is to start over again.                        

Disappearing subject.

ink, emulsion on paper 65x50cm.

 

                                                       ink, emulsion on paper 65x50cm

                
                                                                           ditto

                                                                           ditto

                                                    ink and emulsion on paper. 65x50cm

ink and emulsion on paper. 65x50cm

I am spending time drawing, looking hard but trying to make the subject the drawing and not the thing observed and it isn't in any way an excuse for not being able to engage with the thing observed, in this case a tree in my garden, or rather this part of my garden which abuts the tree.

While I am drawing I am asking myself what it is that I want to happen and if I am at all successful will the subject of the drawing become the drawing itself and will the other subject disappear and so a transmutation of sorts  occur and so a new thing made.

So it was of great interest to me to be lent a copy of John Berger's The Shape of a Pocket and read about the subject disappearing. He cites among other things two very different artists, with different approaches to drawing, Leon Kossoff is one; Vija Celmins the other.

He suggests that the painter is continually trying to discover the place which will surround and contain his present act of painting but that the trouble is that when a painting fails to become a place, it remains a representation or a decoration. However when, if, a painting becomes a place there is a slim chance that the face of what the painter is looking for will show itself but the longed for return look can never come directly to him, it can only come through a place.

What any true painting touches is an absence - an absence of which without the painting, we might be unaware.

This example of absence is also to be found in the Fayum portraits: and in the making of these there is an acknowledgement of the exchange, a reciprocity.