Kim's Game - work in progress 2

Pen drawing of an aesthete.



Below: Kim's Game Oil on canvas, 59 x 65 cm - stages 4 (above) and 3 (bottom)







For previous versions see:

http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/09/kims-game-work-in-progress.html

and

http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2009/08/work-in-progress.html

What has happened? I've cleaned the background, making it more uniform. The broadly triangular shape to the bottom left above he maroon oval has been refined. It reminds me of both a salt cellar and a phallus. The pink oval on the top row has been given a brown edge, which makes it seem 3-dimensional.

I am not sure if making everything sharper was really the right way to go: the gentleness of the previous shapes was part of what was appealing about them. But it is incredibly difficult- impossible, I'd say- to "go back". Paintings become more and more focused, shapes become more and more defined; insistant as you work on them- it is unavoidable.

A picture which was meant to become suggestive becomes less is as it is elaborated. And, so it seems to me, that I am best at artwork which denies equivocation.

*

I am good at ink drawing because this technique has a knife-edge quality about it: there is no half-way point between failure and success. If it is good it is excellent; if not, the drawing goes directly into the bin. It isn't really possible to correct an ink drawing because you cannot erase the ink.

Oil painting of the sort above is difficult for a personality such as mine, because oil paint allows endless tampering: it can be scraped off, overpainted or wiped away, and I am unable to resist the temptation to make endless the little corrections which seem necessary but actually serve merely to reduce the force of the image.

My happiest style is akin to the quip, to an aphorism, or a rebuke. It denies regret. My paintings are like over-elaborated jokes, they are laboured: they miss the point of a quip which lies in its rapidity and surprise in a given context and not necessarily in the profundity of what is said.

Lost is concision, that much underrated quality in art. And critical here is the notion of "the gesture". There are oil painters for whom "the gesture" is an intrinsic to their vocabulary- Kokoschka springs to mind- but even so this element is less apparent in his painting than in his drawings and is more prevalant still among the draughtsmen such as Kubin, Belloc, Lear and Beerbohm who are my true companions: ironists and satirists mainly.

This sort of work is sarcastic and slight: it has wit, but sometimes lacks substance and one can become trapped in irony and that is why I shall continue to try to make oil painting work for me.

The Laughing Man

Oil on Canvas, 81 x 81 cm.

In the first three images the lad seems really to be trying to "hold it in", especially in the third, where he appears to be biting his lower lip. Only in the fourth is he laughing openly. I may well work forther on this picture.

*

In working on these I note that the following elements are necessary to depict laughter, as opposed the grinning, or smiling:

1. The mouth should be open
2. The head should tilt back- ergo the features should be foreshortened and the upper row of teeth and throat visible.
3. The eyes should be narrowed.
4. It helps if the shoulders are raised, so the laughing person seems to be in a fit of hilarity.

*

I am not sure if images of people laughing necessarily provoke laughter or even a good mood. Laughter is so often cruelly directed at another that if we do not know what someone is laughing at, as in these pictures, then the effect is often sinister (these painting are quite large which enhances this effect).

Even those laughing Buddhas have a crazy quality to them. It is as if they are laughing generally, at human folly, perhaps. But that is hardly a very helpful response to the world's problems, so the laughing Buddhas imply abandonment to suffering, giving up on humanity.

True isn't the response of a person fully in control of themselves, (as anyone who remembers schoolteachers telling them to "stop laughing" will recall) so the image of a laughing man can suggest hysteria, loss of control, breakdown, rejection of order.

And often laughter is not a response to something that is really funny (unless one defines "funny" as anything which provokes laughter, which would include tickling, for instance): I mean, it isn't a response to a comical transformation, but to a change in circumstances involving social embarrassment or restriction (I recall here how during a compulsory school Christmas church service the entire congregation of children found themselves giggling hysterically during the sermon. Christianity is a bizarre, portentous religion, but it isn't especially funny: simply the prohibition on laughter created the desire to laugh. After the service one of the boys was taken and belted for his laughter: muscular Christianity indeed!).

Gothic Princess

The princess is naked except for flippers and a raiment of eyes and ferns. The eyes protect her from wickedness and as a result she is generally very content. Her disposition in warm: despite her gothicism she is of a sunny disposition.

Here she is doing the rounds on her tiny white pony, perhaps talking to a particularly virtuous peasant.

Going to the Sea

You feel fed up, you drive to the sea

The waves come in, the waves go out: you watch them listlessly from the window of your Fiat Uno.

Nothing has changed: you drive home.

In the Garden - An Annie Story

*

In the garden

One of the places I went with Annie was a garden. It had walls and you could stroll about in it. I was impressed by the range of flowers and the strong mature trees. There was a charming Yew hedge and even a little rose garden. 

 But as we strolled admiring the fine lawns and Annie became increasingly silent, pensive even and I had begun to wonder if there was anything amiss.

 “Annie, why are you so silent,” I asked, “you are like a walking brick.”

 “Well…”said Annie. 

 “Yes?”I said. 

 “Well,” continued Annie, “it is just that the garden is so very beautiful but we will have to leave.” ‘Yes,” I said. “That is surely unfortunate. We shall have to leave and return to our squalid flat in South London.”

 “Mmm…” murmured Annie. sadly. 

 “Hmm,” I responded, in what I thought was an appropriately sympathtic fashion. 

 But as we walked down the path a large monster appeared, like a snake with eagle wings and talons. 

My dear, we fled!

*

Personal Art

Man with a Vagina for a Mouth

I was often told by tutors at Edinburgh College of Art that my work was “personal”. I think what they meant was that it appeared to provide access to a private self: scratchy drawings, images of fantasies, a specific, hard-to-imitate way of making marks. A couple of tutors suggested that I abandon oil painting and focus on ink and watercolors.

The problem for me was that I didn’t really want to found an artistic career on something “personal”. I wanted to build my artistic career on an idea of classicism. I’d somehow absorbed Goethe’s idea the Classicism = health and romanticism = sickness, and that “personal” art was a romantic product. I’d also absorbed the idea that discipline was an essential element in the creation of art. I was a rather moralistic young person (I’ve noticed since then that young people are often very priggish indeed), and I felt that the mission of art should incorporate moral terms. This somehow seemed absent from the sort of drawings (illustrated above) that the tutors were referring to, partly because they were dependent on humour, an element always absent in any moralizing aesthetic. And I felt that these drawings were a side alley, a diversion, and there wasn’t enough there to sustain my interest. I didn’t think I could spend all day making little drawings like the one above.

This was the 80s*; there was a revival of painting going on. I went to a very traditional art college: the training roughly Beaux Arts in structure, with compulsory anatomy, life drawing and strict distinctions made between drawing, painting, high and applied arts (a hierarchy where oil painting is at the top, and drawing and applied arts at the bottom).

Also, I had a good element of perversity, in that I would do the opposite of what was suggested by tutors (it was ironical, looking back that they had, in a way suggested producing work which was a-typical of the college course expectations, by raising drawings to the level of finished paintings. I suspect that those tutors were bucking the official line: there had been problems with students who’d produced degree shows consisting only of drawings, because the College had a defined their Fine Art course as consisting of two examined specialisms, “drawing” and “painting”).

Anyway, I was unable to value my specific talents, seeing them as somehow necessarily inferior to the methods and ends of artists (usually old masters) in museums.

But my “classical” paintings were in fact simply paintings that negotiated established conventions) and consequently they were often dull, and it was only when I accessed my “personal side” usually in drawings that I made things at all memorable.


* Moreover Scottish figurative painters had managed to establish themselves prominently in the cultural and commercial spheres (specifically Stephen Conroy, Peter Howson, Stephen Campbell, John Bellany, and Adrian Wiszniewski). There was a culture war going on with painters fighting post-modernism (pluralism), and I was on the side of painting, mainly because I valued craft, and did not see craft as being valued in modern art. In retrospect, pluralism won: you can do what you like. My fear of pluralism in Art (postmodernism) was that if all forms of expression were permitted and everything was art, then how would a language of art ever be developed? Surely, only by following a tradition could one hope to clearly communicate anything, because an artist needed a language and a language was a shared cultural inheritance, a tradition? But I think that fear hasn’t been realised. You can “push the boat out”: there are always precedents to make meaningful comparisons so that something is conveyed in your expressions, however fanciful. And in the end, it’s only art, it doesn’t really matter that much, no-one is going to get hurt, and much of the argument and discussion of the 80s that I lived through has more to do with ego than really coming to terms with what visual communication can or should be.

It should also be recalled, when we criticise post-modernism for being intellectually flabby, how restricted art practise was prior to the war: a writer was not allowed to aping, a painter could not do illustrations and a poet could not also be a novelist. There were many exceptions, of course, but they were remarked upon, as such).

I Love You - An Annie Story.

"Do you often think about escape?" asked Annie.

" Don`t so much now, but I used to. I used to think about it all the time, and sometimes the desire to escape became so strong that I wanted to commit suicide."

Annie began laughing. "You are quite preposterous," she said.

*

A pause.

*

"I love you," I said.

"Do you? Do you really?" said Annie.

"Yes. I do. I love you more than anything."

"Really?"

"Yes. I do, I really do."