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I was trying to get at what goes on in your mind, whether you refer back to things you've done before, if you have a repertoire of linked ideas. The visuals that are repeating are happening automatically, they're not planned and I'm also finding in my work that I have a compositional repetition. Looking at two apparently different pictures I find when I look closely that I've used essentially the same composition. I find this repetition of compositional placement is happening regularly. As I look around the room I see many instances where there's a lighter area in the lower right hand section that blends into dark in a circular arc. It's something I'm just beginning to realise is constantly happening. |
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Recently I had a commission for a painting of two cats and a tortoise, I was left free to combine them as I wanted. So I started applying the paint and working with it and eventually I had 2 paintings for the commissioner to see. There was one painting I was happy for her to purchase but the other absolutely not. Both the connections worked but the connection on the first one's particularly strong and working on it gave me insights into 2 painters that I admire immensely, that's Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. I've done a lot of thinking about them as I was painting, making soft-edge, hard-edge, responding to the physiognomy of the cat, responding to the visual proportions in that drawing. But in the process of this, I began to understand something more about maybe what they were feeling when they were painting, I feel I can see through their visuals... and as a result hopefully feeling something of what they were feeling when they were actually making a similar mark on the painted surface. |
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The combining of the 2 cat faces, the top, the ears, the grey cat, the bottom chin and the brownish cat, they've merged into this one block like those Rothko paintings of orange against um, a lesser orange area, their subtle veils of tone. There are concepts of visual objects yes, but there's still tonal values, tonal veils - that's really a dark area, that's really a light area... and I began to see it as a tone piece. |
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And then Pollock, with all his calligraphy, calligraphic lines, his very spontaneous movement... When I'm working with the brush I like a 'Rigger'. I love working with something that will give me a very fine point but also a broad area (I mutilate them, I don't respect brushes, poor little things they get abused by me). I want something that gives me that wonderful variety of point to broad edge, and in the process of doing that you get unexpected calligraphic lines, but you can control it - as Pollock knew - the flinging of the pigment, I'm sure he knew basically what he was going to get when he flicked in a certain direction, he knew basically what might happen, but there's an element of chance that makes the whole unpredictable.
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