Losing control

At the moment  I am exploring the borderline between figuration and abstraction using the human form as a subject; I've been painting from a lovely live model and from a couple of photos of fascinating Maltese neolithic sculptures which demonstrate a completely different view of the female form  from the western European tradition.

The paintings are just quick studies, so sometimes I get an intentional effect, sometimes I get a happy accident, which I can use later, and sometimes I get a total car crash. I have several issues that lead to dangerous road conditions. 

I really want to develop a free, vigorous and improvisational style - this means lots of paint, which is expensive. So I use cheap acrylic paint, which does not mix well, has a sort of yuckky texture and pretty garish tacky colours. So far so iffy. I have managed to mess around using PVA and mixing in relatively small quantities of better colours to improve things. Also I am painting on paper, which inevitably tends to wrinkle up with the paint.

The real problem is keeping an iron control of myself with regard to composition and colour palette while really letting go with the palette knife, brushes or whatever. I think this is a classic for all painters. Basically, if you keep thinking 'what an interesting colour - I can just add that in here' and get carried away, you end up with a sort of browny, blacky mess.

That's what happened to my neolithic goddesses. I didn't think clearly enough about the colour palette in the beginning, and then having made my decisions I didn't stick to them - as an excuse I was under time pressure and I carried on painting feeling it was all running away with me. I was into an uncontrollable skid.  

I include my goddesses as a dire warning to all painters in danger of driving on to disaster. Remember, the main technical problem with any car is the nut behind the wheel.

Sammut else

While in Malta we went to the Fine Art Museum which is mostly full of dreary 17th century carravagist stuff (although there are a few bright interwar portraits, one Turner and some Lears).

However, tucked down in the basement/atrium was an exhibition by a local ceramicist, Mario Sammut: Humanity in Forms. Aren't they lovely and sensual?

See  his website at: http://marioceramics.webs.com/
      



















This painting is by me - I put it in because it is one of the few of my own that I actually like.

Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939) - In Quest of Beauty

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=181750191862020

There were a couple of surprises at this exhibition in Valletta, Malta. 

I expected the exquisite decorative posters, adverts and objets d'art- the figures on the posters are life size and the limitations and imperfections of the lithographic print process make them  actually more vibrant and believable. 

Sketches from Mucha studies

 As often with many artists the studies and initial sketches are almost as interesting as the final work and I made a  few sketches from his studies and photographs.

Mucha had a brief 15 years or so of phenomenal success and fame and then suddenly became unfashionable as Art Nouveau faded and I had no idea what happened to him. Having made his fortune, following the 1st World war, he then returned to his newly established native nation of Czechoslovakia. He designed the postage stamps, currency and national emblem, then devoted himself to his Slav Epic a series of monumental murals charting the history and mythology of the Slav nations. 

The Epic is a bit too Dungeons and Dragons for me, but the real discovery was his pastels. They are so much more uncontrolled, brooding and dark than his other work. Yet he didn't take them any further. Some of the figures reappear in his paintings but highly finished and, to a contemporary eye, sanitised.  

The Slav Epic and his more domestic paintings of the 20's and 30's are very much an extension of his early decorative work. The colour palette is similar and they all have a 'staged' composition, reflecting his mythical intent. It seems a pity that he did not build upon the more experimental mood and technique of his pastels, but all his finished work is extraordinarily beautiful and I came to the conclusion that he just liked painting that way, and why not?

As a Slav nationalist he was very vulnerable and, like many artists, writers and musicians, was seen as a challenge to the Aryan hegemonic ideology of the Nazis following the German invasion. As an old man he died in 1939, following a brutal interrogation. A sad and strange but not ignoble end for the creator of the iconic image of Sarah Bernhardt as La Dame aux Camelias.

Paint, Ambiguity and Sensuality

I love the sheer joy of applying paint. You can slosh it on chuck it at the painting and your brain communicates directly and physically through your body to the surface of the work.

My work is best when I can get a balance of spontaneity in execution with hard serious consideration of composition and overall concept in advance. Never achieved it yet.

Looking at the work of Cecily Brown, I really want to create something that has her element of ambiguity and sensuality. Although her work appears very expressive and spontaneous it is actually carefully considered and developed over a considerable period of time.