Experiments #3

Loads more work-in-progress shots.

I’m having fun in the studio at the moment, rattling between lots of different canvases. Of course, these canvases are tiny [20 x 30 cm], so it feels pretty easy and low stakes to mess around with them. It would be interesting to scale the process up at some point and see what changes. I suspect quite a lot would.

These few weeks have become a little more focused than I originally envisioned, mostly because I decided to try and make some new work for the Tavistock exhibition. This isn’t a bad thing, but it has meant that I have approached the making in a more output-orientated way. There is a slight shift in pressure when something moves from being ‘just’ studio research to something that might actually need to leave the studio and function in another context.

I’ve learned something from that shift. I started this process by talking about making a discrete set of paintings that I could use as data points in the larger project. Then Daniella generously created the Tavistock opportunity, and I decided that I could kill two birds with one stone. The problem is that I now know I don’t think it works quite like that. It’s really difficult to make paintings that might belong to something larger without also trying to resolve each canvas individually.

Maybe I should have seen this coming. I have made iterative sequences before, but those involved repeating the same image. That kind of repetition produces a variated image with an identifiable index. There is something to return to, even if the individual works remain vague or unresolved. As soon as I start simply riffing on ideas, things become much more diffuse. The lack of an index means that I find myself oscillating between throwing paint around and worrying that none of it makes sense.

That said, I have really tried to lean into that uncertainty. Over the last few years, I have developed a fairly programmatic way of painting. There are visible steps and a logical sequence. My interest in the visibility of the trace has led me towards a quite restrained and evidential way of working. In these paintings, I have tried to subvert that process. Sometimes I have carried on painting when I didn’t need to and, conversely, stopped before I ‘should’. It’s fun, but it’s also difficult. Instinctively, I want to plan, refine, and resolve.

I do think I can hang something in London that works (although this is assuredly not about making sense, quite the reverse), but I also need to take some learnings from the process. There is a question of scale and the fact that this will be a composite piece. If I made one large painting at the cumulative size of all these smaller canvases, I would probably want there to be some kind of balance. I would want busy areas and less busy areas. I would want moments of density but also places where the image could breathe.

This is much harder to manage with a pick-and-mix selection of small paintings. I keep wanting to resolve each canvas, but I suspect that resolving them all individually might make the combined result feel too hectic. At the same time, I started this short project wanting not to second-guess the result. More than that, I wanted to give myself a pile of paintings that could be assembled into one larger piece without planning some sort of final outcome in advance.

So, it’s tricky. The process is useful, but not in the way I expected. It has shown me something about the difference between making components and making paintings. It has also shown me that even when I think I am setting up a loose, open-ended system, the old painterly instinct to resolve, balance, and make each thing hold together is interestingly difficult to resist.

There now follows quite the dump of process pictures. I haven’t annotated them, as I’m unconvinced that would be useful. This was not a logical, thought-through process. Just vibes really. They are posted in sequence, and I think they communicate the way in which I have bounced between the various canvases.