Hunting Party
It looks as though I have finished a small painting I am calling “Hunting Party”. Its one of the cave painting series. Acrylic on canvas. All oxide pigments.
It seems to have interesting depth and life without the normal stages of pushing into the underpainting.
It will sit around for a until I get past the emotion of making it and can see what it looks like.
The images in this work are coarser than the images in most of the earlier works, less defined. The light and dark in the background paint gives the figures a feeling of movement and possibility.
I have a passion for rock and cave paintings of almost any kind.
This has inspired a body of work where textures are the prime focus and the image is almost secondary. I wrote several essays at university on artists who worked in this way although they were struggling with the mediums and ideas of the early twentieth century.
none of the finished ones are signed yet. Signing a painting consigns it to its historical context and adds it to the body of art in the world and my work is not there yet.
My normal way of looking at my work is to feel contempt for images I have made. They never seem to reach out to me until I have lost and rediscovered interest them. They need to be viewed with “new eyes” as some people say. It is a strange thing that the desire to work on an idea can be so compelling and then a sort of blindness. Intellectual orgasm?
A lot of the past few years have also had long periods where the combination of disability and me/cfs has caused the death of any true creative vision.
The most embarrassing thing in the world is showing your friends a series of these “masterpieces” and having them congratulate you merely because they are supporting your efforts then waking up one day and seeing what rubbish you have been enthusing over.
The day you realize you have started to shed those limitations and are “seeing” again is most excellent. I just fall back into the doubt and wonder if the inability to recognize that I was producing rubbish might not be still in effect now. It is a deeply distressing and disturbing possibility. All your efforts and feeling that you might have made something that touches your inner places might be delusion and no matter how hard you punish yourself or work against it all the illness will make it unbeatable. It is not my greatest fear but it is there
The image to the right still has some chalk marks although most of the white is the paint. It will hang on the wall for a while or abide in cupboard until I can see what I am having trouble seeing.
The photo is a little deceptive as some of the white is also shine on the surface.
May 9th 2009 addendum
The effects of me/cfs are as bad as suspected earlier in this entry and the painting is rubbish at its present state. Unlike the image in “Purple Patch between Flowers” this one has promise and it was early in the process to declare it finished. Being ill all the time not only makes things an effort but the taxing effect on the mind means extra work and memory problems to really make the process tough.
These paintings are not about learning a process and zapping out acceptable images on a production line basis. I have seen some very wonderful painters who use known styles and techniques. For them the process is refining those techniques and masteringing them to bring you wonderful visions. For me it is a battle to find a way of making this medium say what I want it to say without any referal to past styles or techniques. This is experimental art and each painting is a part of a learning process!
One of the problems in this series has been that illness has made it difficult to put lavish efforts into some of the creative process. These paintings will work but at some stage they require a level of excellence that cannot be met when the artist is slumped over the canvas barely able to raise a smile. The size of the work area has been a problem. There is not a place in this tiny house to set up a clean area that can have a lot of chemicals and paint splashed around and can be left between work periods.
This series requires that extra effort on the final surface to give the whole thing depth and make it come alive. It requires excellence in the rendering of whatever image is worked into that final surface so all the underpainting has a purpose. I will get there.
Today was spent studying “The Horse” magazine to understand how horses are made as well as books covering the language of primitive art. The image that pulls the whole painting together will be a leaping horse with the hunting party pushing through the surface. If the image of the horse can convey the real energy and beauty of action it will look great
Some idea of the mental struggle is in the 14 versions of this that had to be done so it would make sense..sigh