some new works; in progress.. in the studio
i work out the composition by drawing with a range of textured mediums and tools, keeping it very neutral in shades of ochre, grey or sepia, seeing how light hits the surface, balance, contrast, the textural changes... depth of colour seems unimportant at this stage; i prefer them bleached out, faded, worn, tactile, blind surfaces... this winter i think i will refer to tarmac, dust, grit, putty, slate, steel ,brick, tarpaulin, bitumen, copper, lead and chalk for my palette...and some reference photographs (cropped square) taken between march and july 2008...
and then, there are these to finish, my incidental paintings on plaster & wood panels...
...i've been looking again at the wall drawings of Sol LeWitt
not illustrating anything except their making, physical traces of programmed events..
and Brice Marden's symbolic and calligraphic Hydra paintings..i stayed on the island of Hydra as an art student, courtesy of Athens School of Fine Arts..and then Gerhard Richter's Cage paintings..
and my memory of the room devoted to them in the Tate Modern London..the ebb and flow of active markmaking, the scrambling of data, motion blurred, obliterated and revealed, synthesized, reduced, condensed and yet expansive, unfolding like a kaleidoscope, the object's transformation is the subject, literal associations are meaningless... then, returning back to the issue of landscape, it's a signifier not signified, mirrored from, of shadows, remains, imprints, what has registered, passed by, gone before...and what of the road to zen...? well, i attempted to draw a mindmap of buddhism in relation to the environment... it became all too convuluted and complicated with the many pathways and interpretations, but it begins with a selfless acceptance that impermanence, the transience of all things is the truth, joy is temporary, dependency is the cause of suffering, satisfying greed is short-lived, an empty gratification... that is, using a commonly used western idiom, you can't have your cake and eat it... and so with art, it's not about (possession of) the object, but what meaning you derive from it..