The week has been an interesting one, busy and distractions galore.
I have been painting, drawing, reading, and obviously not writing...
Thursday I was sitting in Brewed Awakening with Jordan, just after he got off work and I spent money on unnecessary things. Enjoying a hot chocolate [ best hot chocolate in Newfoundland is found there] and perusing a Taschen "Art Now"
book. In it the artist
Peter Doig is featured; a Scottish/Canadian/Trindad artist, who is known for this interesting landscapes. I am not a huge fan of his work, they don't do it for me, or at least the reproductions don't.
He did say this "
I don't think of my paintings as being at all realistic. I think of them as being derived more from within the head than from what's out there in front of you."
It is not one of those wonderful epigrams that can be debated endlessly, but struck a chord with me, for obviously my paintings have a sense of reality to them, but they are definitely more from my head. I will say they are not surrealist, but rather constructed to fit certain subject matter and formal considerations.
I think at times, or rather, in honesty the majority of the time, terribly conscious of the subject matter. In that I think about what I am painting, what is is suppose to be, suppose to look like, I never get to the surface, to just the surface. Lucien Freud said "
Mustn't be indulged to the subject matter. I'm so conscious that that is a recipe for bad art"
I think from that I understand why my drawings are seen as more confident, more stronger than my other work. In my drawings, the imagery matters to me, but doesn't control the drawings. The drawings is just done, to be a good drawing. I use the line more easily, tones, everything is just done.
Painting seems different for some reason. Despite my experience with painting, I can not get the same execution of my drawings in it. There is some block there. I have been changing my painting process more, to mixing up large quantities of paint, working more wet on wet, using paint stick, etc. Something just isn't clicking yet. Maybe I have to bust out a lot more paintings. Smaller perhaps, and lots of them?
