Asilo III (detail)
2011_fig0611-dtl
Opening this Friday 01 July at Lindberg Galleries, Melbourne:
Painting 11 (There will be no skulls in this exhibition)
Painting previews of my most recent works, Asilo III and Figure 0611:
Opening Night: Friday 01, July 6 - 8 PM. Lindberg Galleries, Melbourne
bacon_studio
"As well as photographs and printed images, there is a considerable collection of paintings in various stages of destruction. Over a hundred slashed canvasses...Bacon acknowledged that he encountered problems when the paint became too clogged on the surface. When he couldn't push it any further, he would cut it up."
~Barbara Dawson | Francis Bacon: A Terrible Beauty, p.66-67
This is reassuring and inspirational, especially in the presence of abandoned and destroyed works. In response to this, excavating old, fragile or previously discarded images (and there's no shortage of these) can offer up continued fodder for painting. Distance and time can shift perspectives and insights. Observation, awareness and resourcefulness are key.
Source image taken by John Deakin c.1933:
Francis Bacon source Image: John Deakin c. 1963
untitled - unfinished
"if one begins to cherish, and like what one's done, one's actually on a very slippery slope indeed..." ~Frank Auerbach
It is not certainty that compels me to rework a painting.
unfinished painting
This painting has been handled in surges. I have tried working faster, laying on less and less paint, but the more I attempt to pre-determine outcomes the less connected I feel to the end result. Absurd and outmoded though my approaches seem to me at times, ultimately I rely on instinct and the process either feels genuine or it's abandoned; its subject, its properties and its execution follow no recipe.
an unfinished painting - untitled -
------------
ps. Currently working my way through T. Godfrey's Painting Today, Phaidon Press 2009, and highly recommend it.
in progress
When painting ceases to be fundamentally linked to any form of discovery, then for me it ceases to be anything at all.
2011_Asilo2_final
The most recent instalment of a new painting, Asilo II.
It was sourced from earlier head studies, photographic samples and drawings which, though they may have influenced it in some way, did not dictate the representation of a specific gender or the literal observations of a human being.
The detail shot:
Asilo (detail)
“work that is made perfectly… and that is perfectly clear and perfectly certain, I don’t care for because I find the implications of that dangerous, in a cultural sense – as a value. I am offended by it as a person.” ~Sean Scully.
I concur.