This is the one that went wrong, oh so very wrong. It started out a minimalist, cool, matte black with a delicate wisp of red. Then the spray can broke, dumping an obscene amount of varnish in one spot of the painting, you know, the irredeemable one. I painted over one place and I painted over another, and the red wisp no longer looked wispy and before I knew it I was just going in with my hands, the only way I know how.
Painting for me (apart from anomolies like the wispy one that nobody will ever see) is a business of dancing, stroking and sometimes fighting with my hands against the canvas, that responds like a drum. The paint does what it does, and when I see what it’s done, I go by instinct, is that a rough place that needs a smooth, or the opposite, does that curvedness require a straight line, it’s all about opposites meeting in a charged third place, and I usually find this without really looking, certainly without thinking, letting my hands respond.
So how, really, can it go ‘wrong’? When my mind interferes, likes what it sees and would like to keep that bit static, would just like to keep that bit. That never works. There’s always a next step, until there isn’t, and that’s not because I decide with my mind I want to keep it, but because something in me just knows that’s the moment, and if I go on past that moment, I’m going to regret it.
I don’t always listen and that’s another way it can ‘go wrong’.
In the case of this painting, which I’ve now christened ‘The only thing you have is the breath you’re breathing’ I did decide to keep a couple of static ideas, neither of which lasted, and I did go too far. The situation (I was also pressed to finish this one for an art fair, and I couldn’t afford another canvas) called for desperate measures, I got my slightly scratched Jimi Hendrix vinyl out and started moving my hands more violently, and faster. It’s about speed, too. The painting does capture the speed, the dynamism, the direction of the strokes. These vibrations remain somehow alive in the paint and can be transmitted to the receiver, not the viewer, but the one who uses their whole body, not just their eyes.
So, when the flurry of motion stopped, the energy just fell away, that was the moment the painting was finished, I stood back and I felt all the layers coalesce. I liked it.