I set myself a small challenge to try to create (or at least start on) one hundred small paintings in one day...
All are 6"x6" on paper... I actually did one hundred and one (having lost count), and they were completed in about seven hours, so that's about one every four minutes. Some are obviously more finished than others; many more days are needed if these little paintings are to result in anything worthy... evocative tertiary colours such as the red-brown of rust, a lilac grey, teal or a limey green, striated bands of colour with subtle shifts in texture.What's it all about? How colour or surface alone has the capacity to engage, how the senses guide you interpret rather than the intellect? So much of contemporary art is intellectually based (or should that be biased), towards the artist revealing something previously unknown? How we should depart from the art more educated and enlightened, wiser for having witnessed its creative revelation firsthand.In truth, it was a dull, grey day, drizzled with rain... mizzling even. I felt motivated to explore colour, to be more productive and work more quickly since I have procrastinated and laboured so much over the recent large canvas paintings (which are now on exhibition at the Centrepoint building in London until January 13, 2009)...Less is sometimes more, more or less...
Irony, just another shade of grey
Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a f***ing big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of f***ing fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the f*** you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing f***ing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pissing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, f***ed up brats you spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that?From the screenplay by John Hodge (expletives disguised) from the movie Trainspotting, adapted from the original novel by Irvine Welsh.Watch the movie clip here
A painter's progress
Fog and fug, grit brown, deep striations, a blush of pink rises through a glaze of smoke... a burnt orange melts into a caustic violet ash...
bubbling umbers, of oil and residue, the cool breeze of cerulean blue... then, a mechanical yellow, breathing blisters from a greenish bronze...
Mere descriptions, slowly unfold a hidden narrative, representing nothing, in reality...Just colour, applied; some of it lived and some of it died...