I finished a couple of little paintings last week:
The starting point for them was some collage work that I made when I was planning the exhibition earlier this year. I think they are perfectly OK paintings, but what is interesting is that I also feel like I’ve moved on from them almost as soon as they are ‘finished’.
I made them in quite a different way to the paintings I made last year. I was much less beholden to the collaged source material, and yet the finished paintings don’t actually look much different.
I’m not sure what this means. Or whether it even matters. It’s just interesting.
I don’t really know why I thought they might feel different. After all, I could see them as I was making them. It’s not as though the outcome arrived as a surprise. It’s just… I don’t know really.
Maybe I had assumed that making them differently would somehow make them different.
Apparently not.
It’s also not that important.
They are just part of the weather of the studio now. They are low-stakes paintings. They can sit in view for a while before going to a show, or going on a shelf, or whatever happens to them next.
I was teaching today and trying to push the idea of low-stakes making, with mixed success.
I really think one of the biggest difficulties students need to get past is the feeling that everything they make has to be good, or right. It’s so self-defeating. But it’s also completely understandable when you are investing so much time, money and material in what you are making.
I always try to push the idea, particularly early in the year, that people should find ways to make things in a low-stakes way.
Cheap materials. Not too much time spent on each thing. Your best concentration while you are doing it. Then some kind of honest evaluation afterwards.
That’s how you find things out.
And finding out that you don’t like something, or that you think something doesn’t work, is still finding something out. You know more than you did before you started.
So that’s a win.
And with those paintings I found something out.
All good.
Anyway.
What this post is actually supposed to be is an update on studio activity, and it will probably end with a dump of work in progress.
There is progress, but it is slow.
That’s not a bad thing. It’s just new.
As I’ve written about before, I’m trying to be a bit more intuitive in the way I’m making things at the moment. I’m trying to let the work emerge rather than deciding too much in advance what it is supposed to become.
To this end, I threw away the starting points for all of the paintings in the studio this week.
There are some big paintings on the go that began with fairly basic drawings. I just threw the drawings away.
I’m now trying to ignore them on the canvas as well.
More weather, I guess.
What I suspect I’m going to find out is something about the relative importance of style and content in my work.
The fact that those two small paintings I mentioned earlier fit so cohesively with the work I made last year seems relevant.
Varying the route doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll end up somewhere else, I guess.
Which is interesting.
I sat in on a lecture at work last week. It was about perspective.
I think I’ve heard the lecture before and not been especially interested, but this time I perked up when the tutor started talking about Piranesi.
They showed some of the Imaginary Prisons pictures and I really perked up.
This might be useful.
I’m currently making paintings of imaginary data centres and there is something about Piranesi’s spaces that feels very relevant to that. The scale, the repetition, the architecture, the sense that things are rational and completely irrational at the same time.
And of course this set off a train of thought.
Piranesi led to Escher (I’m sure this is an extremely well-worn path and I’m claiming absolutely no original thought here) and then I started thinking about Bentham’s Panopticon.
There is something about all of these that feels relevant to the images I’m currently making.
I’m not completely sure what yet.
Architecture. Systems. Repetition. Visibility. Control. Spaces that seem to organise people or information. Things that make sense in one way and become strange if you look at them for too long.
Something like that.
Anyway, they can all become part of the weather in the studio (is the weather thing boring yet?).
Piranesi has already got a foothold in some of the works in progress because I went straight back into the studio and started painting arches.
I’m not sure where any of this is going, but that’s fun.
I have the rest of the week in the studio and it’s nice to approach that with an open mind and a low-stakes mindset.
Make things. Look at them. Find something out.
That seems enough for now.
Leave a Reply