Painting, FINALLY.

My man Josh hit me up and asked me to put some work in a group show at gallery 5 Crown lane for the Easter long weekend. A couple of things factors have forced into a position I should have put myself into a loooong time ago, where I have no other choice but to paint. I've got a bnch or drawings/paintings already framed and ready for the works on paper show that's in the works, but they're too big for the size restrictions, I don't want to do more drawings because that's all I've been doing lately and feel like a change, plus it would cost a bit to get it framed and I don't have the money or time to whip out a decent drawing and then get it framed and all that shiz. So here I am, over a year out of artschool, and I'm finally FORCING myself to paint again. I'm actually super fucking excited!

The drawings I've been doing (fine arts wise, not FWTBT steez, they're different again) have been based on some works I was doing in second year, that are based on multiple views of the same figure at once, creating an area of ambiguous space that all at once creates and destroys the image, collapsing into a void of paint but simultaneously creating marks that work for multiple perspectives at the same time. While this is definitely a concept that genuinely interests me, I think for this little painting, and my first foray back into applying paint to canvas, I'll stick to a single view instead of many, but I will still be constructing them in the same manner, with marks that describe the perspective and underlying construction of the figure to communicate the space it occupies.

The way I like to use colour pretty much derives solely from a Matisse quote where he basically said "if you see a colour, put it down" as seen so brilliantly in works like The Green Line (La Raie Verte) where he straight up blows everyone's minds by slapping a massive green stripe down his wife's face, he saw green, so he put green down, awesome. I like to use colours to inform the depth of the figure, informing the viewer as to where cool colours recede and warm colours advance, push and pull, I don't stick to these 'rules' strictly though, it's up to the artist to make creative decisions that work for the purpose of creating something that goes beyond.


To give you guy(s) a better idea of what I'm doing have a look at this little influence map, featuring some of the artists I look up to, there are plenty more, but these are the guys I'm really diggin right now and best describe where my head is at.

Clockwise from top left; Willem De Kooning, Frank uerbach, Jenny Saville, Egon Schiele