a new small painting
I'm working on a group of small paintings and one good-sized work. The little paintings are informing the bigger one, and the bunch of them have been simmering away for some time. I've been avoiding them lately, but tonight I went in there, and there they were, with the same problems, as I left them, compelling me find a way through.
I admire painters who can conceive of their image, paint it up and be done with it. I'm not like that at all. My painting has always been a lot more anxious than that. I have to test and try and build up ideas and contradictions. From time to time I will look at some of my older paintings and wonder how it was I got there, settled there, as if they were painted by someone else, or perhaps by me in another time.
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I was thinking about the painter Frances Bacon today. Here are a few things he had to say about painting:
"You could say that I have no inspiration, that I only need to paint".
"Before I start painting I have a slightly ambiguous feeling: happiness is a special excitement because unhappiness is always possible a moment later"
"I should have been, I don’t know, a con-man, a robber or a prostitute. But it was vanity that made me choose painting, vanity and chance."
"When I paint I am ageless, I just have the pleasure or the difficulty of painting".
"The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery."
2 comments:
Well, that's a heck of a painting. Very naughty!
I rarely have an idea of "what" I might be abut to paint. I usually have various stories I am interested in and I find I am reading the story as it goes along. I find I paint with less and less paint. A ten foot section of my wallpaper I made yesterday is made up of smaller writing and drawings I've mass produced on the scanner that I'm using as paint and then I mess up with more paint. Sometimes I'm just colouring stripes with a Sharpie.
I don't always know why heh heh...
I'm hovering around 50 feet of wallpaper and no room to put it. It's "rolled" up most of the time now and unrolled to add the next section...space is of the premiumat this point...I sort of have to lay the stuff on the floor and paint it and glue the sections together as they grow...
The process of painting of various artists is a true fascination for me - I find angst & euphoria in the process, frustration and satisfaction - problem solving and getting lost - enjoyed reading yours - it was almost like a love story....
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