Having outlined my approach to the series Preachin' in a language that's completely new and received positive and encouraging feedback I am inclined to expand on certain aspects a little. As I touched upon previously, possibly the most important part of these works is the physical nature and the experience of making them and so this seems the best place to begin. Having thus far achieved some success from a fairly methodical approach, I will continue in the same vein by breaking the subject down into 4 distinct parts:

Paint

painting

The painting

Painting

Please note that repetition of ‘painting’ is not an error, but an inelegant attempt to differentiate between painting as a verb and as a noun and then the noun in the context of an individual artwork and the wider ouvre. Therefore one can take ‘painting’ (with lower case ‘p’) as the behaviour of making, whilst a capitalised ‘Painting’ will refer to the pursuit as a whole. ‘The painting’ refers to the object itself.

Paint

Paint as a substance is a lovely thing. Its whole purpose is aesthetic; to facilitate the enhancement of an object's appearance. To simply change its colour and/or texture. It is readily available or can be easily made in any colour in the visible spectrum. In its wet state (I hesitate to say liquid because much of it does not present as liquid at all) it can be thinned to transparency, will run and drip and be just as fugitive a substance as you would expect, or it can be tar-thick to the point that one battles to tame it. It can be stood in deep impasto and hold its sharp peaks, be as sticky as glue and stubbornly resistant or mayreadily settle to an even, unmodulating surface. When dry it can take on the characteristics of rubber or be brittle and chalky, cracking at the slightest movement. It can be a precise record of a brushstroke, or a perfectly smooth, glossy denial that it was applied by human hand at all (often it isn’t of course). To say it’s versatile is understating the matter. It has a beauty all its own just sitting unused in a can or squeezed from a tube even before it is pressed into service enhancing its support.

As far as I’m concerned paint is the closest one can get to a physical manifestation of colour itself. Given that colour is an experience, a perception rather than tangible matter I propose that no substance better encompases its essence than paint.

painting

The primary reason for adopting this new style has been to offer myself the opportunity to indulge in the passtime I most enjoy – painting. Over and above all the other forms of image and object making that appeal to me, painting as a pure and otherwise unassociated behaviour is the one that most readily draws me in. By unassociated I mean completely divorced from everything else usually aligned with the pursuit – choice of image, composition, drawing, planning, and so on. When I talk about loving painting in the context of these works I mean the very moments of application. The direct sensory stimulation that comes from applying bound pigment to a support with a hairy stick. The texture of the paint I’m pushing around, the contrasting qualities of a hog or sable brush, the tension of the canvas and so on. It is a pursuit happily separated from concept, context or contrivance. A visceral, corporeal, ‘pleasure of the flesh’ if you will.

And it offers more. In the midst of the act, sometimes the anticipation and excitement of success (now made more readily apparent through the new ruleset). Or alternatively an opportunity to ‘tune out’ and let the mind wander. It’s not uncommon for me to drift off whilst working and then ‘come to’ as it were, with some odd phrase or line from a song rattling around and no idea where it came from. It’s a chance to genuinely and emersively indulge in an experience, even if only for a short time.

The painting

In the case of the painting that results from painting the paint my enjoyment stems from my unashamed materialist tendencies - a love, desire for and pursuit of nice objects.

Nice things are nice. I like them and attempt to acquire and surround myself with them as much as possible. To appreciate, more so to own a pleasing thing is a source of great enjoyment for me (although to covet is a sensation more commonly felt). It could be anything – a painting, a pair of shoes, a telegraph pole, and more often than not it will be far from straightforward to acquire, sometimes not possible at all. Therefore to to be able to construct for myself certain objects that go some way to fulfilling this need is indeed very fortunate.

I consider these paintings as objects rather than pictures. It is immdiately clear that they don’t depict anything at all, but I use the word picture to differentiate between them and a work in which the image or forms occupying the picture plane constitute its value.

With the paintings in question the top, bottom and sides are as important as the painted surface. In fact any part you can see really (and probably the back too, even though most would be unlikely to see this in a traditional context). The texture of the canvas, the folds at the corners, the way the paint spills over the surface and moves (or doesn’t) down the sides, any stains or marks, evidence perhaps that the piece of canvas may have had a previous use. All this is important and is pointedly intentional as it adds to my enjoyment of the finished article (hence the detail images on the site). Thus they are objects of which one side has been painted, rather than ‘pictures’.

Painting

The final part of my physical breakdown, dealing with the fact that a Painting is an object rooted in tradition, is slightly less straightforward. Without any desire to embark on a potted history of the medium and working under the assumption that most readers will have at least a vague understanding that paintings have been made for a very long time and that some of them are held in quite high regard, I will say that due to these things I make being of approximately the same physical construction as a large number of those other paintings they automatically hold many of the same associations. Much as they may never be exhibited, discussed or even seen outside my house, still their material nature slings them irretrievably into that grand arena. I am not suggesting that this improves their value or that association alone should cause anyone to think better of them than their own qualities merit, however they still fall within that realm of painting in a fine art context, just as many better and many worse examples do, and are inextricably bound up with everything else found there.

Coming to an end of this explanation and despite numerous redrafts and revisions I feel it still doesn’t delve deeply enough into the points I want to make or communicate quite what I had hoped. I think this is probably because attempting to describe this manual, tangible, visual, but overall personal experience with words is a little contradictory. In this case language is the wrong language, but it’s all I have if I want to share this information. One’s own personal experience will never translate entirely due to it being exactly that – personal. One can share an insight, offer a vague idea of why they enjoy what they do, but in the end we’ll never get it all.

It is a far far better thing that I do now than I have ever done before...