This painting could be my best ever, I've decided. It's called Invaders and it was made in the summer of 2022. It's not really a painting. It is covered in a mix of oil and emulsion paint but it's more of a construction and a carving.
I sketched out a design based on a broken pane of glass, put the paint onto a sheet of plywood, waited a week for it to dry then cut the sheet into hundreds of irregular pieces. It then took me three month's worth of weekends re-assembling it randomly. The tools used predominately were saws, chisels and nails to scour and gouge the surface. I described that process and what lead up to it, in a post at the time.
I achieved what I'd set out to do but it's a very uncompromising, difficult piece to like and to live with. I half-heartedly entered it for an exhibition in 2023, without success, and I would be very surprised if anyone ever bought it. But some things just need to exist.
Painting is I believe, a slow burning medium. Most take time to reveal themselves and be appreciated fully. Therefore, I think they're best hung in a public (long term) or private space where people can see them frequently, tuning them in or out of attention at will. In a gallery, a painting will get 30 seconds of someone's time, if they're lucky, never to be seen again.
I had the painting hung on a wall at home for about six months and I still hadn't warmed to it. It ended up in my loft.
Then I mostly forgot about it as I turned my attention to other ideas crowding my mind.
A few months back I had to go up into the loft to retrieve something. Of all the paintings up there, this was the one that caught my eye - or seemed to demand my attention - and because of the elapsed time and the way time detaches artists from their creations, I was able to see it as a painting, not my painting. And I thought, "If someone else had done that, I would be really envious." I was seeing it in a totally new way and I could see and feel the true power of it, as a physical object. The feeling reminded me somewhat, very obliquely, of three of my most memorable gallery encounters which were this at MoMA in New York, this in Malta and this one in Rome. Encounters that almost knocked me off my feet in their instantaneous impact.
What was it that struck me specifically about my painting? In an age of mechanical mass production, painting is an enduring artisan craft. It's profoundly unlike the mass-produced printed, electronic arts, TV, films and music that we consume, where the creators are far removed from our experience. When we stand in front of a painting in a gallery, we stand in the artist's boots, getting a front row seat of their brush marks, the evidence of their labour. My paintings are no exception to this but with this piece, with it's rough cuts, gouges and scratches, my fingerprints are literally all over it. The experience of the artwork is a combination of the thing itself and the traces of my work bringing it into being. It's the closest I got to action painting, but I'm no action painter. This explicit, sometimes brutal trace of execution is a prominent feature of Modernism, not least the Picasso I refer to earlier which was a game changer in early 20th century art. A notable recent example is the work of Frank Auerbach who makes his brush work integral to his aesthetic.
Reflecting on my painting two years later, it's the most successful piece from that fairly productive twelve month episode when I was working more with wood than paint. However, as an exemplar of a way of working that I am unlikely to return to, it represents something of a creative cul-de-sac. The idea won't be developed further. The lid slams shut.
I can see though that the roughly 50/50 composition foreshadows my current Everything At Once series, so it is a part of my continual development.
Today my brushes and colour and canvas have returned to my studio and I'm enjoying working with them again. The saws, chisels and nails now rust in a dusty drawer.
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