Voids in a Painting

Recently I’ve been trying to make sense of my new painting, but it’s resisting making sense. It wants to do it when it’s ready, and won’t allow me to force a sense into it. And yet who else can do it? The painting doesn’t have a separate existence. Yet it resists my attempts to make it make sense. And I have been trying to make it make sense for several days.

Transitions don’t come easy. This is when artists with more sense than I, put their paintings aside and begin new ones. That’s not how I work. The thought of a painting in the background unresolved seems almost abhorrent!

There is this void in the painting which is begging for something to be put there. Maybe something which will raise the painting out of the ranks of tameness. It’s hard painting beauty without it appearing tame. After all, how can beauty be fully understood with out a little ugliness to give meaning?

Sometimes I feel my paintings cry out for a little rawness. As Tennyson said, Nature is red in tooth and claw. This absence actually gnaws at me sometimes. Because I know there is a brutality out there festering beneath polite society, and somehow I feel it too needs a voice. A subtle voice for my needs, but recognition all the same.

There is such a strong psychological element to my work that I feel it sometimes needs a more raw expression; but with this element comes a fear of losing the beauty of simple things; as though any hint of ugliness will cause a recoil.

But there comes a time when the viewer’s opinions no longer figure. For the mature artist, perhaps the viewer will never figure.

I think there is a fear with approaching the darker aspects of the psyche, a fear of what will arise. Of course the fear is without rhyme or reason, but it’s there all the same. Much of my work is an avoidance of this darker aspect. When the blood of insanity runs through one’s history as deeply as it does in ours, one soon learns to keep all thoughts as healthy as possible. And yet as an artist one also wants to engage honestly with ones creativity, to not dilute or tame it…

So I look at a canvas with a big gaping void in it. Perhaps I should do what Turner did, and turn up and stick a red blob on my canvas and all will make sense!

I suspect there are a thousand ways of approaching the problem of a stuck painting. There are as many ways of dealing with this as there are artists perhaps. Almost certainly, putting a painting to one side would work a charm. But I stop for nothing.

Pushing through will also bring a truth. Because this new painting is a template of sorts for future paintings it needs to be resolved here, otherwise it will simply recur in the next painting. So it’s a language which I need to understand. So I prefer to pursue this painting until it is resolved.

Perhaps my real problem is the fear of ending up with a tame picture. Even one that sells is of no use to me. I’ve done so many tame pictures, which I of course loved at the time. And still do.

But there is something bigger out there. And to get to it you actually have to find your raw emotional truth, your authentic personal expression. How you then convey this with an exquisitely controlled paint brush such as mine, I couldn’t begin to tell you.

So much emotion can come from the brush stroke itself. A vitality. I’ve never seen a raw vitality come from a 0000 sized brush. But that’s my choice of tool. Dali of course had a very precise, tight control over his technique, and also found his emotional truth. So perhaps tools are neither here nor there. It’s what you do with them that counts.