This essay is a collation of my current thinking about my work, processes and musings on the artists I am looking at at the moment. I am going to be busy painting over the next few weeks in the lead up to my solo exhibition, ‘Horizons’ at the Bailiffgate Museum and Gallery in Alnwick, hence this will likely be my last long-form piece of writing until before then.
Surface and Depth: Painting and the Local
By Luke McTaggart, 13th August 2022
As I have been preparing for my upcoming exhibition something that I have been thinking over is my working process and the relationship it bears to my subject matter. Specifically, my locality, Amble. Geographically my painting rarely strays outside of a 5 or so mile radius. There is an element of perversity in my sticking with this narrow geographical area, I exercise an almost religious devotion to the local. Yet I do not feel limited in the slightest by this. I do not drive but never much feel the need to go beyond my immediate surroundings to find inspiration. This attitude stems as much from the overwhelming breadth of things I have found to paint here and ideas about how to do it, as it does from my single-mindedness. The more you observe and get to know a place and the more you try to paint it, to try to capture it and pin it down through painting, the more it is that you notice beneath the surface, and the more ideas that emerge out of it.
At the moment I predominantly work in the studio, away from the subject, spare the odd daytrip outside painting. An evening walk or bike around the town and fields gives me a sufficient enough sense of connection to sustain working. I begin most paintings with a rough outline sketch to map out broad shapes. These sketches are sometimes made from memory upon returning and sometimes from photographs. Occasionally I do make more ‘finished’ drawings although it is rare (rarer than I would like to admit). I find drawings are a useful jumping off point however much of my ‘working out’ happens in the painting. My current working process involves a lot of working from my head, from memory. In some ways my paintings are becoming increasingly ‘invented’. However, given the extent to which I know, have observed and painted the landscapes in the paintings, they are not invented from nothing. Rather they are a regurgitation of all of the things that I have seen and looked at. It is what I think Neil Welliver meant when he said that he looked very hard, then made it up as he went along [1]. Yet, regardless of how the painting is coaxed into existence, more often than not by the time I have finished it the result is surprising, sometimes not at all what I had set out to paint in the beginning.
(Image Credit: The Artist/Alexandre Gallery)
(Image Credit: The Artist/Alexandre Gallery)
Frank Auerbach frequently referred to paintings as emerging from a crisis [2], I think that like Auerbach I find that the paintings I am most satisfied with are the ones that I have struggled with the most. A standard response to a painting going wrong is for me to cover the entire canvas in a single colour (I buy pots of Daler Rowney System 3 Warm Grey, specifically for this purpose). Having scraped the painting beneath off, if still wet, I then begin drawing into the sludgy grey mess with black, or some other dark colour. Probing around for some arrangement of forms truer than the ones I have just obliterated. I find my way out when or if I hit on some structure or arrangement that does ring true, it might be just the shape in the curve of river or the edge of a field but I can recognise it as a spark of something more resolved. If the painting has dragged on for several hours prior and I am feeling tired I leave this arrangement as it is. Usually upon seeing it again first thing in the morning I can tell if it is worth pursuing. However, if I have enough energy left and feel desperate enough I will pursue this ‘found’ composition.
This process usually throws up my best works. The ones that feel the most alive, resolved and well-structured have all in some way gone through this process of absolute disaster, and subsequent retrieval. Of course, this response is not my sole approach to tackling a painting, nor does this approach lead to a resolution all of the time, it is perhaps merely one of the more interesting ones. Sometimes a painting can feel more like flat pack furniture, daunting at first but once you have worked out where all the parts go it is just a case of screwing things into place however tedious. Other times a painting inexplicably just works, with complete ease and freedom (how rare these are!). None of these approaches are consciously decided upon, they are simply a response to the demands of the painting. But, and at the risk of sounding overly dogmatic, I think that generally the best paintings are won or lost, they are fought for and balanced on a knife edge. You have to be willing to destroy things in order to find what you would have wanted had you thought of it beforehand (to borrow a Diebenkorn-ism).
It is perhaps already telling that I am devotee to Philip Guston, and like most painters of a certain disposition I have found that he has been a deep influence on my thinking. I recently read, ‘I Paint What I Want To See’, the new penguin books reader on Guston, in it he repeats his assertion that being a painter is for the most part like being a carpenter [3]. Working away for hours putting paint on and scraping it off, until the final 20 minutes of working when it all pulls together and you begin to glimpse the finished image. He describes this as a kind of waking sleep, your hand moving faster than you brain can think.
I think most painters have sympathy with the idea of the painting moving through you, as though the best paintings are discovered rather than created. Not that this revelation happens all of the time, but that when it does it is bliss. A state of pleasure that is so delightfully satisfying it immediately makes the endless hours of adjusting and reworking worth it. Yet, it is short-lived, and as soon as it comes it has gone. Doubt creeps in, and you begin second-guessing your initial jumps for joy, but of course without this there would be no reason to keep on painting. If you were ever truly satisfied with a painting, why paint another?
In the above clip, Auerbach, retorting against his daughter-in-law’s suggestion that he appear in a tv programme that would ‘demystify painting’, asserted that painting was mysterious and that he did not want it demystified [4]. This sentiment is something that I have sympathy with, and I think perhaps in order for people to really enjoy painting, maybe in the way that painters do, they should be privy to the presence of this mystery. For them to know, at least in part, that painters don’t necessarily always have a strong handle on what they are doing, only that there is a strong urge to pursue it regardless. Indeed, these essays are my own attempts to wrestle with and determine what I am doing.
I feel that by painting the places I do, I am trying to see them afresh through the act of painting. Whether it is Amble Harbour, my beloved pond or fields or any of the other spots that I frequent, painting seems to root me in these places, to give me a greater sense and appreciation of them. This straining of memory through matter, recalling the landscape through painting, seems to throw up arrangements and compositions that feel entirely new, a sky that I have never quite seen before or a set of reflections that are surprising. Yet, these arrangements in the paintings have a distinct familiarity, they are places and things that I know well but that I am seeing anew through painting.
Negotiating the different ‘formal challenges’ of a painting is part of this process. My bringing it up here stems from a desire to express the fact that I feel my work is as involved with the act of making a painting of a landscape, as it is with the landscape itself. Negotiating the relationships between form, colour, gesture, line, surface and proportion are as real in the act of the painting, if not more real, as negotiating how to depict foliage, water, light and air.
Neil Welliver spoke of the ‘fact of the painting’ in reference to the physicality of his work in terms of size and surface. Some of his largest works were up to 8ft square and he enjoyed the fact that people remarked as though they felt they could ‘walk into’ the paintings, yet that they were equally repelled upon seeing the flatness of the paint. He spoke of the way in which he hoped that paintings would oscillate between something that had pictorial depth whilst maintaining this surface [1]. Helen Frankenthaler said a similar thing in that she was aiming for painting that simultaneously insisted on flatness and then denied it [5]. ‘Having your cake and eating it too’ as Welliver says in the same interview.
These views are ones that interest me and that I share, views that I have tried to summarize in this essay. One of my preoccupations in my thinking about painting at present, lies in this idea of a tension between the picture plane and the surface. How open and deep a space can I create, how much of a sense of atmosphere can I suggest, whilst also, simultaneously, maintaining and pushing the upfront-ness of the paint, as matter on a flat surface. Just how far can I take it?
Of course, one of the ways for you to find out for yourself will be to visit my upcoming exhibition ‘Horizons’ at the Bailiffgate Museum and Gallery in Alnwick. Opening November 1st and running until January 29th (Please note that the museum closes for Christmas and New Year from December 12th to January 9th). For more information on opening times and directions please visit the museums website (Click here: https://bailiffgatemuseum.co.uk/).
References
- Neil Welliver in conversation with Edwin Denby: http://jacketmagazine.com/21/denb-well.html
- Frank Auerbach Quote: https://artofquotation.wordpress.com/2017/03/14/real-style-is-not-having-a-program-its-how-one-behaves-in-a-crisis-frank-auerbach/
- Philip Guston Talking: https://www.pwf.cz/en/culture/guston/2165.html
- Frank Auerbach To the studio: https://youtu.be/bFrJeaqnj14
- Helen Frankenthaler Quote: https://www.inspiringquotes.us/quotes/XjCu_Vf0DmwF5
Further Reading
- ‘Neil Welliver Great American Painter’, YouTube: https://youtu.be/ht_5csln19k
- ‘I Paint What I Want To See’, Penguin Books: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/444969/i-paint-what-i-want-to-see-by-guston-philip/9780241525715
- ‘Frank Auerbach, Speaking and Painting’, Thames and Hudson: https://thamesandhudson.com/frank-auerbach-9780500293997
Luke McTaggart 