Blank Canvas

Toothpaste

Light bulbs

Green veg

Sudafed

Toothpaste

Light bulbs

Green veg

Sudafed

Toothpaste

Light bulbs

Green veg

Sudafed

Toothpaste

Light bulbs

Green veg

Sudafed

Toothpaste

Toothpaste

Toothpaste

Sudafed

Toothpaste

Light bulbs

Toothpaste

Green veg

Toothpaste

Light bulbs

Lightbulbs

Green veg

Toothpaste

Light bulbs

Green veg

Sudafed

Toothpaste

Light bulbs

Green veg

Sudafed

Toothpaste

Light bulbs

Green veg

Sudafed

Toothpaste

Light bulbs

Green veg

Sudafed

Toothpaste

Light bulbs

Green veg

Sudafed

He bit her ear off in one attempt.  Then after a few minutes of chewing, swallowed it and used his hands to remove the back of her head.  After he had eaten the rest of her face, he sat back, allowing his stomach more space.    The next morning he walked past her headless body to make breakfast.

Colour

During my first session at Edinburgh Printmakers (EP) I made some choices on colours that caused me to reflect on what I was doing.  I had originally tried to make a desk and chose random colours that didn’t match, but they were colours that I liked and some were already on my shelf, used in previous screen-print editions I had made.

Following on from that session, I decided to try a more muted and connected range of colours that made me think about text. What are marks? Are they nouns, adjectives, verbs? Things? I decided to trial a muted range of greys and blacks, opaques and transparent colours that related to a previous colour scheme that I had been using for some time.   During this session I was thinking about transparencies and opacities more, about how to build colours and layers on top of each other.  I was creating a painting while I was working.

The following session I began thinking about the body, the fact that the marks were from my body, so I changed colours, mixed some flesh tones, dark reds and browns, like dried blood with its oxygen removed, reduced to iron, an accident in the studio and bright oxygen saturated blood spills and finger print marks.  While I was printing and mixing colours I was conducting a sort of narrative in my head about where these colours came from.  Eventually, I started thinking about how I was thinking too much??!!!  These were thoughts that were going on while I was making, my mind constantly in a process of evaluating while I am working.  I liked the initial colour of flesh, how it blended with the wood grain and built on from that, how it seemed like an organic growing out of the wood itself.  It made me reflect on the fact that this is often how I work – in response to something – an object or a poem.  This time it made me think about this as a response to the surface of the painting, even though the original idea for the colour choice had been about the relationship of that colour to my body.

At this point I was thinking about how I was maybe heading off on directions way ahead of myself.  I often think about the next step and go there before I have fully worked out the thing I am engaged with.  But testing colours and thinking about them, then making decisions on this is something that is important, I think. These are simply tests. I thought about the desk and the fact that there would be many colours on the desk.  Some I was using in paintings and others not, for example when I made myself a printing ‘triangle’ and painted it magenta.  This is not a colour I have used in my paintings (I think) but it exists in my studio so I must have liked it enough to buy it.  I can’t remember how it got there. Maybe someone left it. Going back into the past to reclaim thoughts is not productive, memory has errors. The next step for me logically was to make a desk with every colour in it and not worry about it too much, just work intuitively.

Surface

I had been previously working on paper and I felt that I needed to move from paper to make an object on a surface – like a desk.  The work felt too much like an image, on paper.  This couldn’t be a section of a desk because it is not solid enough, I couldn’t build it into an object.  It just felt like an image.    So I am currently trialling different surfaces.  Plywood, white laminate, aluminium, mdf, all interesting surfaces, all possibly desks.

Gesture

While I was screen-printing, it occurred to me that some of the marks on the screen were different in their making, they were different types of marks,  I have been thinking about them in terms of intention;

active – passive

direct(ed) – indirect

(more) controlled – (less) controlled

What I am trying to say is that some of the marks were obviously made flat, such as splatters and splashes dropped from a height that didn’t spill. Some (e.g. drips) relied on gravity to appear as they did.  Some were made quickly with brushes and some were unknown, perhaps spills, more like wide textures.  I also made a coffee ‘stain’ by photographing this, changing levels and then cutting it out on photoshop and printing it onto acetate.  In this way I could control the tonal requirements for screen-printing.   In fact all the images were digitally reproduced from my own painting sketches. (All lies?) Until I started to add ‘bloody’ fingerprints, which made me think about why it was important for my images to be digitally produced.  Was it?  Like the desk that didn’t have to be an actual desk and the gesture that didn’t have to be an immediate gesture, did this mean that I couldn’t add any immediate or direct marks?  That it would stay ‘wholly printmaking’. What would make them different?

Task: I decided to test this out by making a painting of direct ‘painted’ gestures and marks alongside the screen-printed one.

Ambivalence: uncertainty about something or whether a thing is approved of or wanted, something that is difficult to deal with.

When I think about my own mixed feelings with painting, it definitely includes feeling some degree of guilt (is shame a step too far?) about making an object considered to be of high value (financial, cultural, historic and intellectual prestige).  I remember a tutor saying to me, it is obvious, the value in medicine, in science, but more subtle in art. I try to reconcile my thoughts with this statement. I don’t know, there are times, a lot of times I really struggle with this concept, this indulgence. Specific concerns for me relate to working in a ‘middle-class’ environment, a feeling of being in a place I don’t belong.  Having ‘working class ethics’, what does this mean?  I have struggled to allow the creative process to appear, to engage in cultural activities to allow ideas to incubate. Sitting on my arse, waiting. I should be working!  Start at 6am and work til 6pm, making a ‘product’ or being ‘productive’. (Does the academic context give the work more value, the thesis?) But this is also a problem – shouldn’t I be doing something that contributes more to the world?  Shouldn’t my art make a statement?  Material-based working, filling up the world with more things.  Taking the easy way out, making object-based work.  I sometimes hear people laugh as they say “we are supposed to use the word ‘work’ to describe what you do; to say to artists, ‘how is the work going?’ is that right? Thats how you are supposed to talk, yes?”, telling others “thats how you are supposed to say it, ask them about their work”.  The word ‘work’ seems out of place to them in an artistic context.  This appears to be a universal thing.

Helen Molesworth discusses ambivalence in painting, centring this around abstract expressionism.  She expands on this through a discussion of the artist Mary Heilmann and how this ambivalence provided the impetus for her becoming a painter.  How in being rejected from a 1969 exhibition at the Whitney Museum, Heilmann moved from sculpture to painting, becoming engaged with Colour Field painting, something she hated and began to explore it with a sense of irony, using cinematic technicolor and commodity marketing colours, she became interested in how colour is coded in culture with class, gender and how this can make something ‘hard to look at’.  She discusses how theorists such as Rosalind Krauss (Grids, 1979) and Roland Barthes (The Photographic Message, in Image, Text, Music, 1969) discuss the idea of trauma as a means of expressing image making during this period.  Molesworth adds that although it is traumatic to be outside of language, it can be traumatic to be inside of language for many women. Silence, hostility, repression and avoidance are terms she uses to describe critical reception to artists work and at times the language within the work itself.

Molesworth, Helen, ‘Painting with Ambivalence’, in WACK! A Feminist revolution

My work recently appears to be going down a route where I am intuitively inclined to distance myself from gesture in some ways.  Either through photographing my own hand made marks or putting them through screen-printing processes.  I am not sure exactly why this is and although this is not exactly a new thing for me, I usually don’t alter these kind of gestural marks.  What does that mean?  The kind that are obviously real and easy to make in the studio?  It seems like more bother than is necessary, what would be the point?  Would viewers be able to tell?  Would this even matter?  I was moving studio last month and I couldn’t move my desk.  It was too large and I hadn’t booked a van, just borrowed my Dad’s car, which was too small for my old desk.  My new studio was much smaller than the one I was moving from anyway and so the desk wouldn’t fit and I would have to buy a new one.  I chopped it in half and put it in the car to throw in the tip.  I did look at it and think it would make an interesting painting, the start of one perhaps, but I threw it away anyway, deciding at the time that the new studio was too small to hoard things that may become useful.  Of course a few weeks later I was actually beginning to work on a painting that reflected the small space in front of me, the personal space where I begin to make work, the space I draw or write in.  I thought that the desk would have made an interesting start point for new work.  I was initially quite frustrated with myself for throwing it out, initially dreaming up bizarre plans to break into the tip and retrieve it, although the desk would no doubt be gone by now.  The frustration and irritation turned into acceptance as I began to question why it was so important for me to use the actual desk I had been working from.  What if I created a ‘desk’ and used that as my start point?  Wouldn’t any painting resulting from my work be attributed to me anyway?  Both made by my hand.  The initial purpose was different, but the intention was to create a painting around the working out of ideas, the creative phase, but that point where I was not painting but thinking, dreaming, avoiding, procrastinating, doodling perhaps, having coffee, continuously moving back and forth to boil the kettle because I have no idea what I want to be doing yet. If I created my desk then that would at least give me something to do, to start painting.  But what if I went further and screen printed or photographed it, so it was so far removed from my actual physical marks?  Why did I have the desire to do this now?  I have no idea but decided to stop overthinking and get on with doing it.  The work would provide me with the answers anyway, it always does.

Mark Godfrey (2014) in his article ‘Statements of Intent’ discusses the work of Jacqueline Humphries, Amy Sillman, Laura Owens and Charline Von Heyl.  In particular he focuses on their relationships to abstract expressionism and the ‘fake’ gesture.  This is something I am interested in.

Deleuze suggests the hand (of the artist) connects the fragments of unconnected and disparate time-space.

I make a cup of coffee first thing in the morning, when I arrive at the studio.  It sits next to me on my desk and I begin to work while I am waiting for it to cool down.  Often I get lost in work and forget the coffee is there but I always take a drink at some point.  Sometimes I get the temperature just right and I drink some more, but mostly, it is cold.  I re-heat the kettle and fill the cup to the top again.  It sits next to me on my desk and I begin to work while I am waiting for it to cool down.  I get lost in work and forget the coffee is there but I always take a drink at some point.  Sometimes I get the temperature just right and I drink some more, but mostly, it is cold. I re-heat the kettle and fill the cup to the top again.  It sits next to me on my desk and I begin to work while I am waiting for it to cool down.  I get lost in work and forget it is is there but I always take a drink at some point.  Sometimes I get the temperature just right and I drink some more, but mostly, it is cold.  I re-heat the kettle and fill the cup to the top again.  It sits next to me on my desk and I begin to work while I am waiting for it to cool down.  I get lost in work, forget the coffee is there, but alway take a drink.  Sometimes I get the temperature just right and I drink some more, but mostly, it is cold. I re-heat the kettle and fill the cup to the top again.  It sits next to me on my desk and I begin to work while I am waiting for it to cool down.  Often I get lost in work and forget.  I take a drink.  Sometimes I get the temperature just right and I drink some more, but mostly, it is cold.  I re-heat the kettle and fill the cup to the top again.  It sits next to me on my desk and I begin to work while I am waiting for it to cool down.   I get lost in work.  Forget. I drink from the cup and barely taste coffee.  Sometimes I make another cup of coffee.  Sometimes I go home.