Completed Painting: 'Vestige 1'

'Vestige 1', Acrylics, Paper Collage, Ink, Spray Enamel, French Polish & Misc. Solvents
On Panel, 60 cm X 60 cm, 2016

Well, we’re a couple of weeks in, and I’ve just completed the first painting of the 2016.  That's pleasing, given my intention to ramp up my creativity activity again after a relatively sedate second half of 2015.  Truth to tell, this painting was started just before Christmas, but the majority of the serious work took place over the last couple of weeks, in a few relatively intensive bursts.

Anyway, ‘Vestige 1’ is intended to be the first in an ongoing series of pieces all sharing the same basic, rather spare motif, and overall compositional format.  The idea is to repeatedly explore what might be described as a rectangular ‘zone of absence’, within a square field of varied but indeterminate visual texture.  If that all sounds both a bit grand and frustratingly abstract, I should perhaps explain that the original source lies in some of the recent photos I’ve collected of the ghostly clean patches, revealed undercoats, rectangles of tape residue and the like, which remain when posters or signage have been removed from public walls.  Squiggles of adhesive mastic and fragments of actual poster material also feature fairly regularly in some of this source material, and may well creep into subsequent paintings in the proposed series.

'Vestige 1', (Detail)

I’ve featured a variety of photographs of this kind of thing here, in recent weeks, as my camera has been drawn increasingly to subjects that suggest a sense of absence, removal, or loss of some artifact or channel of communication, in the urban environment.  In an attempt to boil down my current concerns into handy buzz-phrases, two that keep bobbing to the surface are: ‘Traces of that which no longer remains’; and ‘Lost voices’.

'Untitled', Acrylics, Paper Collage & Spray Enamel On Paper,
30 cm X 30 cm, 2015

An overriding description of the spirit in which I propose to approach this particular series of paintings might be: ‘The same, - but different’ [1.].  Of course, there’s nothing new about the idea of painting a series of relatively uniform variations on a theme, and it’s really just an even more distilled step on from at least some of last year’s ‘Map’ paintings.  Anyway, as a consciously adopted M.O., I’m going to regard it as being unashamedly in the tradition of Monet, Reinhardt, Newman, Ryman, Richter, and a host of others far more illustrious than I.

In terms of specifics, the essentials of this particular motif can be seen to derive from a couple of my recent paper-based studies.  Unlike others in that small body of work, - from the back end of last year, (and which were more generalised in nature), those two were triggered by a specific photograph of a section of grubby Birmingham masonry.

Central Birmingham, October 2015

As already mentioned, my lens has been full of this kind of thing of late, but it feels like this particular motif is the one that kept returning to my mind as the idea evolved.  It always interests me how such intuiting of resonance operates both forwards and backwards in time.  I’ve certainly noticed how a current and specific ‘favourite’ can not only call to mind a store of related imagery, (sometimes set aside in the archives for years), but also lead to the active seeking out and collection of even more, during subsequent expeditions, (as is already occurring).

'Untitled', Acrylics, Paper Collage, Ink, Adhesive Tape & Spray Enamel
On Paper, 30 cm X 30 cm, 2015

It’s fair to say that the processes by which 'Vestige 1' was produced represent far more of an evolution, rather than the revolution I might have originally hoped for.  One stated intention of late has been to allow more painterly freedom into some of my work.  In the event, whilst there is some greater reliance on the essential properties of fluid media, and a deliberate combining of often chemically incompatible materials, there remains a significant component of the paper collage approach I’ve been using for quite a while now.

Visually, I also found myself falling back on my customary device of a screen of repeated spots, (perhaps alluding to half-tone reproduction), as a means of getting across a given area of the picture plane.  What is different though, I think, is that both this, and the visual evidence of other collaged elements, is now subsumed into a more generalised field of ‘all-over’ visual texture.  We’re talking fairly fine margins, - I realise, but working on this piece definitely felt a bit different from previous ones.  Perhaps, I can push myself a little further into new territory, as far as technique is concerned, as the series develops.

'Vestige 1', (Detail)

One definitely significant development here is that the element of text, which has remained a feature of all my work in recent years, is here relegated to little more than mere visual texture.  This is deliberate, not least as another possible allusion to the 'lost voices' or obsolete meanings suggested by the rectangular absence.  It remains important to me that those textual allusions should remain, in however fleeting or fragmentary a form.  Indeed, I’m happy to set this as a definite parameter in which to keep working, - but am equally happy that this might now include texts that ‘no longer remain’, as well as those that still do.

'Vestige 1', (Detail)

Oh, and this piece definitely reflects my current preference for a (nearly) monochrome palette.  It’ll be interesting to see how long that holds, and whether the occasional colour accent opens the gate for more a more heightened chroma to eventually return.



[1.]:  It occurs to me, this isn't so different from John Peel's famous description of The Fall, although in their case, it related more to an overriding aesthetic spirit, rather than a propensity to work in series. Coincidentally, the specific 'ghost patch' photographed in Birmingham lay very close to a daubed graffito reading, "Hit The North", - one of that band's song titles.