War and Peace
2020.04.26
Some of you may have noticed there was no blog last week. I was not in the right headspace as last blog day was the 4th anniversary of my, incredibly gorgeous, father’s death and I miss him like a vacuum in my chest. It’s also my favourite foraging time of year as the wild garlic is young and sweet before it flowers and becomes bitter so I spent my blog time peacefully in Saint Donats woods gathering young leaves for wild garlic pesto, contemplating the passing of time.
For anyone who takes their painting seriously they will know it’s not easy. It’s not just painting a picture and its technical rendering, if it were it would be a mechanical, step by step process leading to a formulaic result that could be achieved by a well programmed robot. For me, it’s a constant ‘toing and froing’, as my mind deals with conundrum’s and solutions both technical and emotional, not just about the painting but what it is to be in this world.
Sometimes war rages, I can find no solutions and seem to destroy paintings, each layer becomes deficient in relation to its predecessor. This can be said of my humble and decadent crabs mentioned in my last blog, with every layer they appear to me to be deteriorating into chaos, bearing no relationship to what I am trying to say.
Jac showed me a painting by Adrien Coorte 1697.
As I cycled to my studio, I passed a vegetable stall, selling new season asparagus and bought two bunches. I faced my crabs to the wall and with a peaceful frame of mind began to paint these intimate small paintings.
Interestingly when I photograph paintings, I am not happy with, commonly the photograph looks way better than the work itself. Conversely when I photograph paintings, I am happy with they never look as good as the real work as is the case with my asparagus and crabs.
It’s all about failures and successes. There is so much failure before success. I sometimes visit galleries and find a mediocre painting by incredible artist and think to myself, hmmmm, I bet you wish you’d burned that one before you died! But its from failures that we learn, they are an essential part of the process.
I am also continuing to work on my human anatomy drawing skills. I am sketching bones in various orientations, then trying to redraw them from memory.
I have also been side-tracked by ears. I had no idea that, although they all look so different, everyone’s ear is made up of the same structural components being, the helix the anti-helix, tragus and anti-tragus with intertragic notch and Concha. Knowing this makes it so much easier to draw an ear from memory.
Realising my fascination, Jac has booked in a two-day workshop, in June, where we will be sculpting in clay, layering up from deep to superficial muscles onto a wire armature to gain greater understanding of human form. There could be no better person to teach me this as Jac has the most unusual knowledge in this field as she travels up to a medical department at a university in Scotland for weeks at a time to dissect cadaver’s for her own creative investigation.
That's it for now the rain is returning tomorrow so I'm heading out to make the most of what's left of this episode of sunshine.