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A new start needed, so starting over here

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Painting Jo

I must have been working in Jo's portrait for close to a year. I started the distanced portraits during the pandemic as my brain reached into stores of memory for experience that was absent in my day to day life. They seemed like a good idea at the time. Both have pushed me far out from what I thought was possible, but also away from what is comfortable. At times I've found it almost excruciating. I have felt at all times the tension between making the image as truly as I can as a painter, whatever that means - honestly I guess - but also torn by holding the likeness of people that I care about, Jac and Jo, in my hands. I have been conscious at each step of not wanting to do harm to either through the images I make and it has weighed heavy on me. At times I think the challenge has been beyond me. Making a portrait, a new image of a person from memory, from image fragments. In Jo's portraits I have had to push drawing to the edge of what I know. I have distorted the body to bring the fragments together, looking to hold it all together under a veil of verisimilitude. I am conscious now, of how exacting portraiture is when working from 1. A fixed image and 2. A sitter, let alone trying to manage without either. I've tried to hold it together with a compositional concept based in the vessel as a meeting of presence and absence, attempting to quietly dissolve the centre of the body while drawing attention to the circle of hands arms and face. This has made me stretch the extent of the cunning I have brought into the painting. Initially my inspiration was in two paintings. Rembrandt portrait of hendrikje at the national, and Sargent's madame x for a little sass and light flesh. I painted the foreground in too modern a method to reconcile with Sargent's tonality so had to lighten the background, which has allowed me to lose the torso a little in a mist of unbleached titanium. I had hoped to achieve something of the intimacy if the Rembrandt with the confidence if Sargent. I've gotten so far with this and probably need to stop for a while so that I can sensibly review. It is at a point where I am unsure of the work but don't know where else to take it.

Both distanced portraits feel disappointing. Suspect both need work. A year spent in what feels like failure is hard to take, given how little access I've had to the studio. Suspect I am not a portrait artist and may be better investing my time elsewhere, or at least managing my process in less preposterous manner. Much to consider. Not least where to go next.

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Jo

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Truth in painting, I think of as a modernist ideal. Not from Picasso, 'a lie through which the truth is revealed', but rather that, in wielding the brush, something vital is transmitted onto the canvas. I was, artistically speaking, raised by modernists. My school teacher fostered in me the divided brush stroke in form painting through careful application of colour and measuring. The route back through Uglow to proto modernist London in Sickert and Gilman. I could have gone that way. Still might. Modernism begins with the division of colour into prismatic marks. From there I went to the foundation course, which is exemplar modernism, emigred to Britain from Bauhaus 30's Germany in the basic design movement. It still teaches, I still teach (inside it) art as the experiment. Testing for truth to materials, seeking the essentials of form, despite masdasnan robes on the roof in Dessau. I find it hard to shake this legacy. Should I want to? There is a kind of weight in throwing off an upbringing. Modernism values the expressive mark, the gesture, the polygraph movement of brush or crayon, that reveals in a language not unlike music, the secrets of the self. I have worked that seam on the long walks through the valleys. I made satisfying drawings, and pushed myself in technique and into physical exhaustion, but there was no mysterious secret to be found. Wherever I walked, I found that I was still there. Markmaking is a dead end ( all approaches to painting are when unquestioned, unchallenged), opening a door to me to repetition. Endless walks, observation, strategies for marks. Thankfully my ankles started to give out around the same time a door opened at the Broadway with Dr.Jac.

The more I paint, the more I am drawn to careful simple painting, in which gesture is, for now at least, elided from process. I favour slow application, care and sensitivity over the macho brushwork of modernism. My sense of self has gradually shifted. I seek space and equanimity over emoting. I am more quiet, more kind, less hungry for myself. I find it hard to relinquish the idea of the experiment, the risk, the daring, although that all still exists on a smaller, less visible scale. And this is partly the point I think. In every artists hand, in the subtle shifts of technique and application of paint is a handwriting that no-one else can replicate. The limitations of the flouncy academies are mainly that they try to eradicate this from everyone in pursuit of an ideal which more often than not has no life to it. A technical and conceptual graveyard overgrown with accomplishment. It's possible to paint carefully and avoid that, I am quite certain. I will continue to work, as feels natural and to aspire, and hope that through painting, rather than just intending, (both are necessary), the hand will reveal itself.

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Some background and a warm, fake tan glaze if w&n transparent maroon

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Couple of good nights painting. I have found working in a larger scale frustrating over the last two years. Few hours in the studio makes for slow progress, not least with a technical process that is about slow building. I am working on Jo's portrait. I had gone in with a sking tone based on caput mortuum, to work with the yellow ochre background. It has given me a decent beginning with tone, but looks a little corpse-gothic, more than a touch of liver Mortis. Again I've aged my sitter, made her look tired. Something in me, maybe tiredness, seems to make this happen. I am drawn again and again to the beauty of frailty, pressures stresses, vulnerability in people, although they might not want my focus there. I am of course, painting my own interior through the image of another. I glaze with terra verte and the flesh begins to neutralise, to shimmer more transparently, and to darken, inviting lighter tones. I realise that the background needs to darken. It is totally too similar to the figure. I rub in some yellow ochre, knowing that I will darken later, most likely with raw umber. I drag the ochre into the shadow of a vessel to lighten and make transparent. When I started thinking about this painting I had in mind Madame x and Rembrandt's portrait of hendrijke. Cool flesh if the first, the intimacy if the second. I am processing other thoughts as I work. There us a large presence of a pot in the left which I echoed by a shadow in the right. I am concerned with the potters philosophy, an interplay between absence and presence, the pit and the void. This is inn my mind as I work. In the Ouse I see the possibility of echoing, with pottery in mind, the incredible Buddha sculptures in the Vand A, where the sculptors create a suggestion of absence in the centre of the figure, framed by arms and face. I wonder if this can be achieved by colour. A recessive grey, finally similar to the background. I will work towards the Idea. I have been mainly concerned so far with the surrounding structure of this painting as a conceptual space, and feel the need to push this forward before tackling the figure. I reground in the foreground adding some lines and marks which I hope will become tools. There is a long way to go......

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Studio. Portraits.

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Can an offensive object be redeemed by love. Does that have a place in painting. When I was an infant my grandmother had a teatowel by robinsons. With a golly on it. You could use it as a template and cut it out, front and back, and make one. She did it for me. She stuffed it with her tights. I loved it, partly because it was from her. He was a jolly little man with a smiling black face. I didn't know then, anything that I know now about what he represents. He was company in the darkness and in sickness. A friend. My uncle, funny story teller and natural illustrator that he was (he was a gardener by profession) would tell me stories about the gollies of South Wales who were miners (there were many black faced miners on Penallta Rd.). They mined for Swedes in the golly mines. In years of love, the bright tough, shiny fabric of the 1970s teatowel wore almost to nothing. Threadbare, disintegrating. One day while I was in school, she covered him in felt to bring him back. I was upset that he'd list his character and she unpicked it. Later, when the damage was too much, I relented, and his top was refurbished. He's like that today. Half felt, half teatowel and tights. I see what he means besides. Symbol of colonial racism, built in the attitudes of slavery, invasion, murder and theft that underpin Britain and it's attitudes in so many ways. Bought into by Robinsons, trade in fruit and sugar. I saw it my father, casual Sid James type racist, confident in his TV humour. As a child I was sickened by it. He's still that way. We don't talk.

Can I paint the symbol, erased and worn and collapsed by love? Can it read that way. A broken statue, torn down by what it intended to deny. I don't know, and I don't know that I have the right to choose

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It's a time of questions. It should always be. I've left a safe place where learning to paint was instruction and following, adding a little of myself here, there. It's different now. The ending of the exhibition has crystallised that. I somehow wasn't expecting it, but the questions about where next are there in every sitting. I am painting less frequently and this amplifies the uncertainty. It is like heading out onto a peninsula, unsure of the land ahead, but the narrow path ahead being the only choice. I could turn around, of course, and be satisfied in stasis, but that's not why I paint.

There are themes developing. More interest in colour, less so in tone. Thicker paint, more direct, more confident, alongside more luminous transparent areas. These are technical concerns. I have bigger questions about what to paint. Some disparate ideas. It is percolating. Usually I am gripped by an overarching idea, but it's not there right now. I am doing other things. Spiritual interests and teaching. I am writing a series of lectures on the histories of art to try to reintroduce my learners to knowledge they're not getting anywhere else it seems. Maybe something will come from that for me.

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Laying in flat colour. A means towards understanding composition and how best to treat the oortrait

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Painting tonight. Recently recovered from a second dose of Covid. I've spent much of the last week asleep. For the first time in maybe a year I feel completely connected, as though I'm not going through the motions, waiting to wake up into something that feels alive. I see from this side, the ingredients of disconnection. Tiredness. The time to give to painting, to be really present with it. There has been little of that in a very busy academic year. I have been working on a large scale, on work that has been slow to finish. Beyond me in some ways. It has been good for learning but a road with no easy rewards. Working with small still life has helped. It is more like home to me. The jam tart us helping me back into paint handling and the requirements, on a more rapid scale. The bricks, from Penallta, are opening other possibilities. Something random happens. I am thinking of a colour for the earth beneath the rocks. This morning I was staring at a patch of waste ground with bare earth and weeds. I mix and paint that colour of earth. Great, yellow ochre, raw umber, a little Naples yellow. I thin the scumble as it recedes and it cools, blues on the green glaze beneath. I decide to scumble a thin warm grey above it for a vertical behind the bricks and it works beautifully straight away. I notice that I am using a very limited tonal range, and that unusually for me, colour is talking. I am in Delacroix grey day, quite accidentally. I notice that the more restricted the tonal contrasts, the more weird and nuanced are the colour relationships. The effect works for Penallta, which concerns the intersection of numen, of the intangible, with the immediate and concrete. I feel a door has opened to another way of working that reconciles what I've learned in recent years, with colour knowledge gained in the past. A glimpse if something more personal. Alive in the present.

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Penallta brick, stone and a study for Jo.

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It will be an exercise in not looking imposing, while built like a six foot gorilla. I learned my face in drawing in my teens. How much I must forget those forms and build instead an honesty of years.

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