Fortunately, my studio stays cool. Outside it might be over 30 degrees but I can still work in a pleasant enough environment, my studio is on street level and never gets the full impact of the sun. Over the last month or so, I have been working on a number of both large and small paintings...here are a few images. All these paintings are are in process, some nearer completion than others:
This wonderful painting by Jan Fyt (1611-1661) "Les champignons" is in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels... it reminds one of the serious pleasure (and hope) that certain paintings can provide. Many thanks to Frank Lubbers for pointing it out to me.
Here is a video of my current exhibition of drawings (and one painting) at Guest Room in Brussels. It's not the best quality video but it gives an idea of the installation and the included works:
Shadows and white petals on the ground which I observed while out for a walk the other day.
The application of paint: to define this a little...it is not expressionistic or the exaltation of gesture, it is not the drama of action painting either. The way one paints or makes something can so often seem like a parody of itself. So, perhaps for me, it could simply be a placement of material, of paint...colour. Making marks. Depositing and positioning something on a surface. Most importantly, it is touch. Through the hand and movement of the arm and body in time, the eyes touch the surface with the brush or implement. Accumulations. Leaving evidence of my time on the surface which becomes a painting. The images form organically like the growth of a tree. Tributes to themselves and the knowledge that the looking is never really done. And then the contradiction: trying to fix and hold still the fleeting moment and that which is always in flow. Leaves fall to the ground along with white petals and the shadows of branches slowly come and go...
Can I describe my trials? I was not able to walk, or breathe, or eat. My breath was made of stone, my body of water, and yet I was dying of thirst. One day they thrust me into the ground; the doctors covered me with mud. What work went on at the bottom of that earth! Who says it's cold? It's a bed of fire, it's a bramble bush. When I got up I could feel nothing. My sense of touch was floating six feet away from me; if anyone entered the room, I would cry out, but the knife was serenely cutting me up. Yes, I became a skeleton. At night my thinness would rise up before me to terrify me. As it came and went it insulted me, it tired me out; oh, I was certainly very tired.
From The Madness Of The Day by Maurice Blanchot 1973, translated by Lydia Davies: Station Hill Press.
Two paintings practically finished. In fact, the darker of the two (shown at an earlier stage on the blog) really is finished. Both are oil, spray paint and collage on linen:
... A twofold frame of body and mind./ The state to which I now allude was one/ In which the eye was master of the heart,/ When that which is in every single stage of life/ The most despotic of our senses gained/ Such strength in me as often held my mind/ In absolute dominion.
What I like about Tango is the way it threads different elements together: something highly refined, something very raw, different traditions, Spanish, Italian, French, Jewish....Jazz, the classical tradition....and a lot more. Here is an example of Klezmer Tango: