Painting (n,v)

I contributed an essay to this fantastic book published by Kingsgate Project Space.

Centred on a series of 2-person painting projects at Kingsgate which ran through 2023, this book begins with new writing commissioned in response to each exhibition. The book then widens its focus with three further essays which attempt to think about how we make and look at painting today, in our moment of painting ubiquity complicated by an anxiety of looking. Particular focus is given to the way that painters look differently at paintings, often by reading the actions and decisions involved in painting-making.

Writers: Bryony Bodimeade, Adam Holmes-Davies, Luke Dowd, Homay King, Dan Howard-Birt, Jillian Knipe, Scott McCracken, Ossian Ward, John Walter, Laura Wormell

Artists: Adam Holmes-Davies, Luke Dowd, Rosie Mullan, Katie Pratt, Sherman Mern Tat Sam, Anna Schapiro, Kate Scrivener, Alice Walter

You can pick up a copy here:

Kingsgate Project Space Shop

In conversation with Weald Contemporary

Follow this link to read an ‘In Conversation’ with Weald Contemporary.

I Am Your Creature

The local branch of McDonalds in High Barnet used to have a strange mural on the wall of the upstairs seating section.  Above the cream moulded plastic seat/table booths, across the wall mediaeval horses and armour clad knights wielded their giant broad swords amid the fields and fog of High Barnet.  The scene depicted was the decisive and legendary battle between King Edward IV and the Earl of Warwick which took place on 14th April 1471, somewhere in the fields around the High Street.  I was thrilled that such an important and gruesome event had happened right here, where I came from. 

I walk up to the obelisk marking the spot where the ‘Kingmaker’ Warwick was slain, thus bringing an end to that stage of the War of the Roses.  It’s not the real spot - no one knows where that is, but it is where some Tory Baronet plonked his monument  in the year of his own death, 1740. But I still make my pilgrimage there, sometimes weekly.  There’s a bench next to the highstone where I can sit and try to imagine that, instead of watching the buses go up the A1001 to Potters Bar bus garage, there are hundreds of horses, soldiers and countless banners depicting the various houses clashing together in an almighty Braveheart style battle for supremacy.

I can’t really recall what the mural actually looked like, and my mum doesn’t remember it at all.  Sometimes when I think about it, it appears as a Bayeux tapestry type comic strip, explaining all the stages of battle and complicated loyalties of the English nobility, spreading out in never ending fractals of information.  But then my memory morphs the mural into a Delacroix type history painting depicting the moment of victory, King Edward slicing open Warwicks’ helmet, blood slushing into the mud.  Neither seems likely, maybe the mural was never there at all and my memories have become assimilated from separate events; eating a chicken nugget with mum and remembering a trip to the highly unusual Barnet Museum with school.  I have probably rendered this memory with more detail over the years, my continued fascination with the minutiae of mediaeval battles seeps across time, infiltrating the various versions of my consciousness backed up on the decaying hard-drives of my brain.

Barnet Museum volunteers have donned every single lamp post along the High Street to the fields with the banners from the main players involved in the battle.  They are up all the time, not just for a special anniversary or reenactment, they are there all year round.  I like to spot a different one every time I walk to the tube station.  I have no idea who they represent or what the iconography means.  There are the typical banner type things you would expect to see; rows of lions or fleur de lys, chequered backgrounds and swords.  Surprisingly there’s one with a large black scythe on a white background - I wouldn’t want to come across that in a battle in the mist.  And then there are the banners that are totally bewilderingly modern looking. There’s a black one hanging outside a pizza takeaway with what looks like three white plastic nitcombs on it, I think to myself, surely they didn’t have nitcombs then and even if they did, why would you put it on your family banner?  Another favourite is one near the station that resembles three white owls travelling on a conveyor belt underneath a motorway bridge.  I don’t make much effort to try and get to the bottom of this surprising and jarring imagery, but by chance I find a leaflet with all the banners printed alongside the name of the person they represented on the pavement outside a coffee shop.  I can see which side of the battle they fought on, but nothing else.  No explanation, no rendering of information.  

I know I could make the effort and go to Barnet Museum to buy a small book probably titled something like Heraldry of the Battle of Barnet which would illuminate me, telling me exactly what each crescent moon and wolf’s head meant.  But part of me resists, my fascination with these banners isn’t about what these symbols meant then.  These newly made banners hanging on my daily walk to the tube through the dull, uber-suburbia of Barnet mean something else now in the exact context of my not knowing.  As long as I resist, I am in perpetual primordial thought, the threshold of recognition.  Returned to a time when I knew my letters but not how to read words.  The banners and their symbols’ meaning remain unfixed in my mind, so rare a state but one to which I yield.

+++

 “You know, Phaedrus, that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly analogous to painting.  The painter’s work stands before us as though the paintings were alive, but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence.  It is the same with written words; they seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a wish to know more, they go on telling you the same thing over and over again forever.” Socrates.

August 2024

Reflections On Walter Swennen: Tell Me Your Secret

I wrote about some Walter Swennen paintings for Turps Magazine Issue 28. You can pick up a copy at this link:

https://www.turpsbanana.com/issue-28

You Again

Tommy Fury wisely said ‘Remember, it’s always you against you’.  The boxers’ opponent is not really the other person in the ring, staring them out.  The weaknesses you know in yourself are the things you betray that allow the other boxer to take advantage.  

My painting, anthropomorphised, mocks me from across the studio.  I have to lie on the floor to avoid its gaze.  I put ‘Jungle Rain, 9hrs’ on Spotify and close my eyes.  The painting remains vertical, counting me out.  

When a boxer is “knocked out” it does not mean, as it’s commonly thought, that he has been knocked unconscious, or even incapacitated; it means rather more poetically that he has been knocked out of Time. The referee’s dramatic count of ten constitutes a metaphysical parenthesis of a kind through which the fallen boxer must penetrate if he hopes to continue in Time.  There are in a sense two dimensions of Time abruptly operant: while the standing boxer is in time the fallen boxer is out of time.  Counted out, he is counted “dead” - in symbolic mimicry of the sport’s ancient tradition in which he would very likely be dead.

Joyce Carol Oates in On Boxing, explaining how when I get up from my extended escape, the painting is still there, unchanged, feet dancing and gloves up ready to go again.

I’m disturbed that nothing has changed since I laid down. I’ll avoid painting a bit longer, lie back down and watch Hearns vs. Hagler 1985 on Youtube on my phone. 

Here’s my trash talk to Anthony Joshua, a man who ‘doesn’t want it enough’ to win anymore - in the pub hundreds of conversations about how he doesn’t really want to hurt anyone so he fails everytime, not living up to his physical ability because his mind has no aggression.  His mind is on his brand deals, his image has won him Deals with Under Armour, Hugo Boss, Land Rover and Jaguar  all worth millions to Joshua and saw him earn a total of £8.9m in 2021 according to TalkSport. 

I wouldn’t want to bash up my face if I was in his position either. Sophie Tea wouldn’t make a painting that would potentially ruin her instagram image of aggressive positivity (‘Mini-Manifestations’ limited edition original artwork dropping today 12PM Shop NOW….I’ll choose ‘I make my dreams a reality’)  You won’t find a section on her website with titles like Mike Tyson’s cheery ‘I want to rip out his heart and feed it to Lennox Lewis. I want to kill people. I want to rip their stomachs out and eat their children’, 2023, Holographic Paper with acrylic and resin, 25 x 20 cm, £1000, unframed.

The boxer doesn’t run from pain, they run to it, ‘public display, all risk and, ideally, improvisation’*.  But Joshua’s brand image suffered greatly following his defeat to Usyk - his stock dropping 35% in a year.  ‘Probably the most potent desire for a painter, an image-maker, is to see it. To see what the mind can think and imagine, to realise it for oneself, through oneself, as concretely as possible.’ says Philip Guston.  What can Anthony Joshua want to see?  Does he see himself standing over his next opponent, rumoured to be Deontay Wilder or Dillian Whyte, as the ref counts him out or does he hear the voice of Dominic Ingle telling him he doesn’t have the “recklessness” to win, so maybe the fight won’t happen. Every week there’s a new fight announced only for it to be cancelled or postponed.  It must be exhausting, promotors, titles, training, photoshoots.  A recently deleted tweet from AJ: "I don't know about any talks to fight Dillian Whyte. Everyday. AJ this, AJ that, AJ's hairline going way back but I'll still f*** your girl go retweet that."

I’ve put down my phone after watching 3 more videos of 1980s boxing matches.  I take the painting off the wall, lay it on the floor where I have just been, pick up a sander and tell it, “I’m going to rip out your stomach.” 

“I do not struggle against the world, I struggle against a greater force, against my weariness of the world.”

*Joyce Carol Oates, On Boxing, 1987

*E. M. Cioran, Drawn and Quartered, 1979

My Special Hell

If you really want to slow time down and live each moment, I recommend having a panic attack.  Even a brief four minutes of anxiety, 240 seconds is abject torture in which you can contemplate 60 years of uninterrupted suffering, consider ripping your own face from your skull or lying down in front of a bus only to be trampled first by indifferent strangers.  

The body itself, the flesh and bone substrate that we run on, causes much day to day suffering.  There are contemporary theories of mind that say the digestive system and its metropolis of bacteria has as much sway on thought and action as the brain.  In a future where technology has liberated us from being bound to our mortal wetware will I be able to upload my gut to the cloud?  Would suffering end with mortality’s death?  What would I be without a body, without emotions and hormones, without interaction with stimuli?  I suspect I would have the same capacity for consciousness as a table or fridge.  Some peace, some happiness.  I’ll take the dread of waking up every day with the horror and knowledge of being:   “I can’t go on. I’ll go on”*.

Franz Schubert said “No one feels another's grief, no one understands another's joy.  People imagine they can reach one another.  In reality they only pass each other by.”  Pessimistic as it  may sound, we are all alone, shuffling through permutations of language and pre-verbal communication, anxious to offer subjectivity to each other.  But of course this is why people make things and why anyone says anything at all.

There is a certain perverse euphoria when I eventually am released from a panic attack, revelling in the simple fact that I didn’t explode. I want to run up to those indifferent strangers and tell them about the time phenomena I’ve just experienced, grasp their hands in mine and look deeply into their eyes, thank them for their kindness in letting me live.  E.M. Cioran puts it best: “We are all deep in a hell each moment of which is a miracle.”*

*Samuel Beckett, ‘The Unnamable’, 1953

*E. M. Cioran, ‘The New Gods’, 1969

Ever Judging, Equally Mad

Stupid Cupid keeps on calling me.* I’m a sucker for a clichéd romantic tale, how they met (me), how they hate now.  Wings and lungs, snakes and sperm, smoking and death, colons and openings.  A number refers to a passage from Wolf Among Wolves by Hans Fallada describing a mouth that looks as though it ‘has tasted every bitterness’, but really it’s just shapes.

The edge, the gateway: the audibility of woman’s pleasure in her fluffy yellow knickers.  The joy of performance quickly becomes the trap of performance, the show and the mask are both liberating and yet come to be a rigid externally imposed role.  Unless it is a mask of your own making, an alternate self that is simultaneously opposite and unilaterally true.  An autofiction of multiple selves.

An internal voice joins in the spiteful hate towards women, towards myself.  I want to paint a nude like Courbet, a dancer like Toulouse Lautrec.  I’ve bound up my mother’s body here, covered it in fur and thrown it into space.  The explosion is a nuclear bomb, the blast left faces lit up in immortal smiles*.  I really like painting the female body, I can’t help it.

International travel and glamorous love affairs with men old enough to be your father; the problematic reality of heterosexual attraction formed in a patriarchal world.  But it’s so fun though isn’t it?  The sexy 70s and our current body-positive shame free (female) sexual liberty come with exploitation, murder and abuse.  I still want to be Jane Birkin on Histoire de Melody Nelson*.

A realisation of the sexiness of the hoof.  Myself as a pot-bellied female faun pursuing carnal desire.  But polite and self-censored. A parody of my own previous paintings creating a confused reality between dream, longing and memory abstracted from real place and time. 

*Fast Love - George Michael

*Kim’s Sunsets - Fat White Family

*Serge Gainsbourg 1971