Slave to the image.
Last week I touched on my struggle against being a slave to the image, my painting skills are good enough these days to be able use an image/photograph and render a copy in paint. It’s an easy route with a relatively prescriptive path that becomes mundane and, for me, takes the soul out of the creative process.
The results of a direct copy can be so good that you say to yourself, ‘Oooh, I’m good at painting,’ massage the ego and move on to the next work, it’s a trap that draws me in. Not copying an image is a harder path with struggles and failures, yet its authenticity takes me to a place of greater fulfilment.
I am not saying that it’s not okay to copy from an image if that’s what you want to do, I have done the very same thing, for various reasons, in the past but weirdly at times, if someone has entered my studio I have tossed a rag over the top of the photocopies, as though they were a problem, a questioning of my ability to be authentic. I have also drawn wisdom from an ex-tutor of mine who said if you’re going to copy an image make damned sure your copy is better than the image itself!
Anyway for now I am trying to use images as my starting point then put them away and focus on thinking about the painting, what I am trying to say and how the paint performs. It can be so unbelievably hard when things are not going well, I find my eye disobediently roaming to the shelf where the copy is stored.
I’m in the early stages so some of the results may not be obvious to you but they are heading in the right direction.
Alan, Jac’s husband who sat for us for two days is becoming a man from my past, a moment that has stuck with me. I sat on the pavement talking to an aboriginal man in Broome Western Australia, he had a beautiful spirit and I felt like I had found a friend and just as I got up to leave he said, ‘have you got any cash.’ I felt so embarrassed for him , his dignity reduced by begging.
This one is me, I think it’s heading towards a nostalgic piece and about parties that are over. They cannot be repeated, people have died, grown old, our family hardwood patio set has moved from the family garden we had such fun time in, into my back garden that looks like Steptoes yard. My mother has far too many dinner plates than she will ever need again, many with chips in from accidents and an overpacked dishwasher after parties with my Godmother singing to the clean-up record, ‘A little touch of Schmilsson in the night.’
This one has something to do with harlots but I don’t know where it’s going yet.
