Sofa without flowers

Diebenkorn’s drawings have always had a way of getting under my skin.

His lone figures convey a sense of what is bold, sensual and agitated about the observed human being. And my response is to want to study them so I can experience something of their making, immerse myself in the physicality and absorption of marks applied and erased over and over. This often leads to stumbling over my aspirations; that sense of your hands clasping together seconds after the object you were attempting to catch moves through them.

And often the only answer is time. Days and weeks of lived experience sometimes need to intervene between you and your subject before a reimagining of it becomes possible. I was about to abandon my childish effort before I realise this figure could look out from behind that right limb of hers and still pay homage to Diebenkorn’s girl on the flowered sofa.

She would have looked right back at him. No flinch.

Detail from 2020 study after Diebenkorn’s seated woman on flowered sofa ~1966

On art making

“It should be something that is happening all at once, that’s inhabiting you, that you are doing and you have one way or another managed to get yourself into that space, and there’s an angel on your shoulder.

That’s how you should make art.

If you are plotting art and trying to make something to get something, you are not in a state of creative innocence. You’re not making art, you’re doing something else.”

— Sean Scully

A funeral for Painting...

Painting the human subject.

The human subject as still life; as vessels for human hope, longing, failure and endurance.
The human subject as landscape; a terrain along which the eye travels and the heart and mind seek out encounters both strange and beautiful.

As history painting of the personal kind; creating a surface along which time is etched and a part of the artist's experience engages the beholder to form part of lived experience.

Let them announce the death of painting. The coffin will be empty.

Image: Head of the Girl - 03012014

as light changes

They are all shifting; light, colour, mood, sensation. And for the best of reasons.

recasting the child

This drawing developed after studying a painting of Nolde's, Bathing Child 1922. It's a far cry from the beautiful naïveté conveyed in his work, but it just sank into me. His painting stirred inside me for a time and after some musing, my Head of the Child is what came out.