Twitcher

As I said in my previous entry "These little injuries" it was Darwin that introduced the concept into Victorian Britain that the animals we share our world with live lives of struggle. In most contemporary books on British wild life photographs are used to depict the various species this island has to offer, but I find these a little uninspiring and they hardly engage me in the same way as the illustrated books and manuals of the past.  

For my depictions I wanted to create bold contemporary illustrations that have more in common with street art then twitchers manuals. Birds are oddly aspirational animals. "To be free as a bird" is a sadly wistful saying that seems to suggest that birds live carefree lives of plenty when the reality is that they are actually incredibly tough, they endure, survive and adapt.    

My prints do not entirely do away with this perceived romanticism and I don't think I would want to entirely, but I do feel that they have been successful in that they feel very contemporary.   

I think that my original print "these little injuries" is the most successful of these three. The sense of weight and the line breaks feel right whereas "I might pray to be reborn" feels a little heavy. "Whippoorwill" is a commission piece for a London based production company. I was really pleased to get this commission and I'm happy with the outcome. The piece feels a little heavy, but then the bird looks fairly solid in real life as well so perhaps that's for the best. 

One year older

One Year Older - Photomontage. 

Every once in a while I feel compelled to create something approximating "proper" Art. I love performative art whether that's the post performative painting of Jackson Pollock and David Hockney or the endurance work of Marina Abramovic. For most people performance art occupies the very fringes of their endurance of contemporary fine art. I know many people, artists included, who would rather slam their heads repeatedly against a brick wall then endure 40 minutes of a woman standing in a darkened room knitting a dress to the sounds of repetitive electro on heavy rotation, but I genuinely feel like I'm part of an intellectual conversation worth having. Sure it's wanky as hell, but art should attempt to engage with people on a slightly heightened level or something approaching sophistication.
"One year older" is a follow up to a piece I did last year. Although I wouldn't classify this as a performative piece it is suggestive of an act being recorded. I wanted to talk about sexuality without framing it in an overly masculine lens. I also wanted to reverse the traditional gender roles within art. I think these photomontages are an interesting way to talk about these subjects and as an artist it allows me to venture out of my usual role of detached observer and to take a more active role in the conversation. If I'm honest I know that work like this is slightly outside the field of my abilities. My understanding of performative art is incredibly limited and I struggle to pin down my thoughts, but working like this has directly fed into all other areas of my practice, allowing me to be adventurous creatively and more determined to strive for something like artistic integrity within my practice.

This ageing young rebel

This ageing young rebel 

As part of my on going artistic development I am required to consider issues arising from my practice and the impact they have on my work. It became fairly obvious to me that my print work and to some degree my paint work as well, is really about the representation of the gesture rather then the gesture itself. With this in mind I wanted to produce a work that would illustrate these ideas whilst at the same time being a bold contemporary print design suitable for a number of applications.

In the house of flies

In the house of flies Acrylic and debris on canvas

Robert Rauschenberg felt that by introducing materials or objects not commonly found in paint that he could blur the lines between paint and sculpture, but more importantly he could create a sense of conflict within the work. This idea has really appealed to me and I wanted to experiment with introducing conflict into my own paint work. Up until now I had played it fairly safe with the materials introduced.

 Dust, card, plastic bags, wood shavings and earth might blend in to the painting creating interesting texture, but hardly offering any kind  of challenge to the viewer. Rather then providing a fixed point of interest, such as the imagery in "New King" or "little injuries" and trying to avoid the unnecessary violence of "bride and groom" I chose to include prominent objects in the composition. For this piece, along with familiar materials such as the ones previously mentioned, I included a pair of boxer shorts and a broken set of headphones. Rather then adhering to recognisable compositional devices, these objects were offset on the canvas creating, I hope, a greater sense of conflict within the work. 

 For me the success of the piece really relied on creating balance between previously explored themes of sex, violence and decay whilst introducing a more absurdist element in the boxer shorts. My work could hardly be described as whimsical, trivial and highly derivative perhaps, but all pretty much done with a straight face and if I'm honest I was nervous about subverting my own work. 

Of course my nervousness was slightly absurd. The elements I enjoy producing within my work are all present and correct, but unfortunately for me the piece feels theatrical in its presentation. I'm not sure if by including these elements that the work becomes overly knowing, a joke that only I'm in on, or if it simply highlights my own fumbling attempts at overt introspection. Either way it seems oddly self serving, but introspection is something that I am particularly uncomfortable with as I had felt that my practice represented a rejection of this kind of naval gazing. 

 Paint is inherently gestural. The artists presence can never be in doubt and perhaps because of this the artist is laid bare whether he/she likes it or not. The truth is that whatever this painting says or doesn't say is down to me and perhaps I'm not as comfortable with that as I had thought I was. 

I'm the new King, I'll take the queen

I'm the new King, I'll take the Queen (series work), acrylic on canvas.

 As a print artist my practice is defined by the processes inherent within it and raises a number of tricky questions that, I believe, need to be addressed and overcome. The most prominent of which is that of artistic proximity. During the US print revival of the late 50's that found artists flocking to the medium a number of prominent American artists, most notably Jackson Pollock and De Kooning , were vocal in their concerns. 

They felt that the process heavy nature of the practice acted as a barrier to artistic expression. This is hardly surprising given both De Kooning and Pollock's own practices, but also raised doubts about the artistic validity of print itself. Many famous artists have utilised the medium as a means to generate income it is after all a cheap alternative to buying an original Picasso, but can a print ever be anything more then copy of thing rather then the thing itself?     

For my series I wanted to turn those questions around. If paint is truly gestural and artistic proximity a given then what would happen if I utilised print processes in my own paintings, effectively removing my hand from the painting, and what affect might this have on the reading of my work? It might be argued that the affect would be very little. To most people a painting is a painting and is judged along purely aesthetic lines, you either like a painting or you don't and process is more or less irrelevant. 

But the manner that we go about creating work of artistic value is as important as any contextual considerations we might make and helps us to frame our thinking. Pollock's practice defined his career not the subject matter of his paintings, but how he created them. Rauschenberg and Litchtenstein also and no reading of their work can preclude it.    

 It may seem like basic stuff, I'm sure that for some it is, but for me it was an eye opening revelation. The processes inherent in print are not a barrier to artistic expression they are simply the context of the works creation. Prints processes, I would argue, frame the work in a world we all recognise, play a part in and subscribe to on a daily basis.Print can, at its best, subvert and manipulate the expectations placed upon it. 

Andy Warhol's series work can be viewed as a media reflexive gesture that draws our attention to the eradication and replacement of what is truly authentic.  Rauschenberg's work is an over load of visual information, where no one image takes prominence over another. These artists embraced print and its processes because it offered them a new set of visual tools and means of expression. 

 Of course all these artists still recognised the gestural nature of paint. Paint has oddly emotive qualities that print does not, but these qualities do not necessarily mean that a painting holds any greater artistic merit then print.  

 Paint now forms an important part of my practice. Paint allows me to work with a sense of immediacy, to effect change in the instance it occurs to me and to create work that is as surprising to me as I might hope it to be for anyone else, but  I use it as just another tool for experimentation. 

For instance this series was based on a print, the stenciled image of the tree was taken directly from that series and a second print was made based on these paintings.

 I like the cyclical nature of working that way and for me if offers the greatest creative freedom, but I still consider myself a print artist primarily because of the processes inherent in my practice.

* I'd just like to point out that I am in no way inferring that these paintings should be compared or considered alongside any of the artists referenced, but rather this article outlines my thinking when they were produced.

These little injuries

These Little Injuries Acrylic and debris on canvas

 Darwin introduced the idea of the struggle for survival in nature, until then many Victorians simply assumed that the English countryside was a playground and that they were its chief beneficiaries so it must have come as a shock to discover that, for the most part, the animals sharing the world with us were in fact facing violent lives and daily struggle. In this way the painting has more in common with my other works (Bride and Groom lie hidden for three days and I'm the new King I'll take the Queen) and explores similar themes and ideas. As an artist my concern is that I may be a little overly pre-occupied by sex and violence.  

 This painting was simply a progression of ideas I had been experimenting with in my other paint work, process and materiality. For this painting I included card, newspaper, rubber shavings, dust, earth and animal saw dust. The more organic materials were chosen for obvious reasons as I felt that they gave the piece more legitimacy in terms of subject matter. However I really should have pushed these ideas further within the piece. My relative conservatism in the materials I used was a conscious effort on my part to produce a painting that would retain a more pleasing narrative structure, but has only led to limiting the piece and robbing it of any real impact or lasting impression. It's a nice enough image and some of the tonal and textural variations are interesting, but the work feels a little under worked. I could of course continue to work the painting, adding layers of paint and debris, but I think as an artist you know when you've taken it as far as it will go and in this case I just don't think the imagery or my initial approach were strong enough to begin with.

It's not easy judging when to finish a piece. It's a difficult balancing act. Too much and the work is a mess, too little and the viewer will be underwhelmed and somehow short changed. It's a shame that this piece isn't better, but it's themes and subject matter are ones that have occupied a lot of my thinking over the year and should become clearer as I progress.

Sex and Violence (updated)

Bride and Groom Lie Hidden for Three Days, Acrylic and debris on Canvas.  

The title of the work is actually the title of a poem by Ted Hughes. Obviously it might have been preferable to make a less direct reference to the poem, but I had the work so clearly in mind while I was making the piece that I couldn't help making that connection explicit for the viewer. I suppose I wanted to subvert the poem's romanticism and introduce a more visceral vocabulary, but the violence implicit throughout might actually have robbed the work of any real beauty and instead could be read as simply another painting about sex and violence. 

 I never intended to create a violent work. The nature of my practice, the methods I use (rollers squeegees, no brushes) and my own choices along the way may give the impression of frenzy, which might be unfortunate given my intentions. For me the piece would be a lot stronger without those connotations and it's a shame that I didn't exercise more restraint or think things through more clearly when I set out. 

  Robert Rauschenberg wanted to drag everyday objects into his paintings in order to create a sense of conflict, which is an idea that I've been really interested in incorporating into my own work and one that has found its way into a number of my previous paintings, but with this piece I felt I could be more confident about the materials I chose to include. I used bin bags, pencil and rubber shaving, sweet packets an old hair clip I found in the street. It is interesting what happens when you use these everyday materials even if, for the most part, no one will ever really know. 

 For me I suppose it allows the work to speak more directly about the world we live in rather then any personal agenda I might have, but then paint is seen as inherently gestural and unlike print generally viewed as a more personal artistic statement.
Over all despite it's obvious flaws and limitations it's not without any merit in terms of my own practice and I hope it represents a step forward for me even if it falls very short in a number of areas.