New approach

I was quite happy with my two latest paintings untill i got them out of the car this morning. I don't know if its the thought of entering them for public view but they now leave a sour taste in my mouth. Limited, crude, obvious and weak are all words that spring to mind.

I could be part of a wider issue I have with where my work has gone. I feel I have become, for the time, to obsessed with the narrative. I need to move towards something less specific, without falling back into old, pointless, lost ways of empty abstraction.

After this current body of work is finished I am going to work small; either on paper on small stretched canvases. I need to explore tone, the surface, the process, the figure and its placement with a great intensity and pace. I need to search, with less conscious and predetermined thought, for my subejct matter. Working small will allow me to get through ideas at a quicker pace and also to not hold back in the use of the materials. (it is a depressing reality that financial limitations can stop you applying as thinck and luscious a layer of medium as you would like)

I think in general i know some of the things I am looking for. I need to just allow them toi come together into a coherent form. Some fo those things are (sorry for repetition)


Figures which sit between abstraction and figuration- lost in and formed from the ether of the paint

Figures interracting with there space in some kind of space. Be it falling across the vertical or floating and drowning in the depths of layers. I want to persue a greater use of archietctural and landscape type depth to stage the figures in. I use these terms loosely but a recent drawing which sets a figures agasint forms borrowed from the architecture in a Tintorretto painting is where I am looking, as is another where a section of a turner has formed the basis for where the figure is situated.


I want the play of image, its destruction and formation to play on narrative notions of time, of memeory, of the fleeting and eternalised moments, of transcience. I want image, form and process to evoke tragedy, melancholy of a human sort. The kind of notions dealt with my Innes in his drip paintings, Rothko in his Seagram mural, Titian in 'Venus and Adonis', Keats in his spring Odes, Hughes in his Crow and Shakespeare in King Lear. I have begun to realise more and more that tragedy is the root and foundation of what I am trying to get at. From this come many other romanticised notions which I am still interested in articulating.


I feel like there is more I need to say but have to dash. I needed to get this down though.