Painting April 26, 2008
Posted by Liz Mead in : Matters Blue , trackbackI paint. I paint with oils, acrylics and watercolour. I guess my favourite medium are oils – because they are so seductive. Depending on the medium you use, you can get all sorts of transparent and rich colours.
Right now I’m wrestling with 2 paintings. Both are based on photos I took on a recent trip. The wrestle is with the process and I guess the outcome.
My problem is that I don’t want the work to be a replica of something I saw, yet I do want it to replicate what I saw – if that makes sense. The images that are pre-occupying me are steps that lead into the water. In both, the water seems so mysterious: one is slightly more bouyant or playful and the other receding with the tide – revealing the rich variegated stone patterns beneath.
I work with the forms yet all the time resisting them. I want to shape and push the forms, to stretch them so they don’t resemble the starting point, and then reconfigure them to make sense of the whole picture. This means continually massaging how they relate to each other on the canvas. I enjoy the colours, the balance, the solidity and fragility of some elements – and have immense fun with the texture of the paint itself. Yet I wrestle with the fact that it should look more like life, more like the original picture, more like reality.
People who see my work – describe it as impressionistic. Is that because I can’t reproduce forms realistically? The reason they say this is because each painting has a feeling of transience and movement. I also think they are impressionistic because I use the knife more often than I do the brush.
Another pecadillo, if you like is a lack of planning. I prefer the painting to emerge as I go along. I like to be suprised at what the painting process delivers – almost magically. It may not resemble the starting point much at all, but it comes to a point when the work is finished and I’m happy to let it go as an impression of the starting point.
Nearly every time I look at my work I feel good about it and about myself. Which is a world away from what I was like when I was a teenager or young adult. In fact, I would recommend painting for all depressives and those working on the renovated self. It’s a great way to fall in love with life and with your participation in it.
I knew a woman once, whom I thought was quite a gifted painter. I couldn’t understand why she judged her work so harshly, refusing to pick up the brush for many years after a “bad” experience (ie a painting she didn’t like). I’m not saying don’t strive for perfection, but really - the world is full of critics enough, why would we add another one to the equation?
Yes, I love the process and I do like the workat each iteration. I like its boldness, the “painterly” (as a teacher once described it) style, which I think just means the fact that I’m not afraid of using a variety of and large amount of paint. In fact I relish in it. Bloke used to find the “mark of bubba” everywhere around our house. A smear of paint on the light switch, on the fridge, on the phone and of course on every wall along my path.
He would be frightened of the work. Not because of the mess, but rather frightened for me I think. He’d notice when the perspective was wrong, or the composition didn’t resemble reality. He thought I’d be disappointed at the end. Of course he was projecting, and when I asked him why he didn’t paint, given that he was an excellent draftsman, he told me that he was too scared. He would spend so much time planning what to paint, that he would become too intimidated to begin – in case it didn’t work out.
I guess I get scared too. Scared that it will end up looking like crap. But I push on through that, it happens about a third of the way through the painting’s life cycle. And I remind myself that crap is all relative. One person’s crap is in fact another person’s delight. Last week I dreamt someone commented on my painting to the effect that “It looks like shit”. “Exactly what part of it and what sort of shit?” I asked in the dream. At the time, I put it down to a heavy night on the turps (booze that is) because the painting resembled a truncated intenstine, and I did feel like shit the morning after.
So I’m writing this while my two (yet to be finished) paintings dry. I’m writing it to remind myself that the process is incredibly rewarding – with fresh discoveries all the time. And I’m writing it to remind myself that the process itself is a way of wrestling with my own way of seeing the world - ”In real life” or in my head. The view in my head is like “real life” but is mixed up with all the excitement of other inflluences.
Farewelling my sister on this morning’s flight to Hong Kong, and then onto Budapest; cleaning the house and washing the linen in preparation for interstate friends; getting ready for dinner with a close friend and her guests tonight, and remembering how sublime the Merchant Ivory production of “Howard’s End” was last night.
Yes, all of that has an effect on whether I see the water as emerald or mauve, and whether I paint the stones with a dab or a dash and just how much paint - that I’ve just plied on do I now scrape off – in order to give a sense of well trodden steps.
Magical.
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