I miss

'Too loose, circus rider, turn on your childish grin,

Shine on through the long black night, go ride the dawn again.

Your eyes are stars that sweetly twinkle, aureole around your head aflame.

Sad story that you cannot tell, where no one is to blame.

And anyhow its only something sure to come down with the rain. 

Would i could hear, your song so clear, the words could touch the air, 

And catch the moon's reflection in the colour of her hair.

To ease this ache of loneliness and blind the facetious stare.'

-Pentangle, 'So clear' (1971) 

I’m currently surrounded by my on-going pieces of work and looking at a page from a book – the page is titled ‘Painted fictions…’ sometimes it would be best ask it as question ‘Painted, fictions?’ I wanted to take Adrien Emmanuel Marie’s ‘Feeding the hungry after the lord mayors banquet, interior of guildhall’ (1882) and feed it through the meat grinder (no pun intended) the same with John Henry Henshall’s ‘Behind the bar’ (1883) a year after Marie’s piece was finished. I was discussing with someone about bar scenes in particular the other day – which I believe that some of the greatest paintings are of bar scenes. I wanted to put Marie’s piece on show – to encapsulate the small flesh ridden piece of meat (you think of Saville, Soutine, Rembrandt, Bacon… taking on massive carcasses to depict) as a one off piece. Figuratively, sometimes, my pieces are about endless amounts of carcasses being dragged around and sometimes they are just about nothing- just about standing around; about different levels of loneliness, about every person i've met and how fucked up things will always be, and how warm human life is.

The idea of a ‘motif’ works on many different levels, and probably doesn’t work on all the same levels it does work. One can be surrounded by five or fifteen paintings and depict some language of them, as much as the pictorial qualities though not just as these pieces are now, living and reproducing in this language but the countless reproductions of them throughout time. W.J.T Mitchell discusses similar ideas‘…but if vision itself is a product of experience and acculturation – including the experience of making pictures – then what we are matching against pictorial representations is not any sort of naked reality but a world already clothed in our systems of representation’ (P.38 ‘Iconology’) Someone said to me “you also create your own philosophy.”

For some painters, it can just be about the paint. Understanding and studying completely the surface, what you are using and sometimes how utterly shit the work can be as well as good. We know it has been one of the largest practised, serious and philosophical contributions to an endless amount of artistic mediums that survive today. John Berger’s ‘and our faces, my heart, brief as photo’s’ (1984) (opening with a poem) takes heed a connection with painting ‘the language of pictorial art, because it is static, is the language of such timelessness. Yet what it speaks about – unlike geometry – is the sensuous, the particular and ephemeral’

In issue four of Turps Banana– you’ll find an article on Dawn Mellor’s work, she depicts and deals with images of celebrities – Mathew Weir states ‘The less accessible or understood part of Mellor’s practise is the violence she inflicts on her painted images of celebrities. Her work are not just a comment on a celebrity phenomena but a conduit for violent urges.’ Mellor’s work has a fascinating juxtaposition of these two “things” – I remember reading this article ages ago and being fascinated with her heavy application of paint and “violent” effects on the surface (separated I think) and fascinating use of 'horror imagery' Weir then goes on to describe it as a possible idea of self-harm ‘It may be that if painting was removed from the equation, the violent acts that Mellor inflicts on her work could be directed towards herself in the form of self harm. Mellor has suggested that, at times, the violence she inflicts on to celebrity image helps her feel closer to them and makes them more real. This is a feeling that is often expressed by self –harmers; one reason for a person inflicting cuts, burns or bruising to their body is ‘to feel real, if they are feeling numb or remote from the world around them.’ It stuck with me because it’s a serious, personal issue to engage with, and more fascinating when linked to painting. 

'Janet Leigh from Vile Affections' 2008 by Dawn Mellor

Oil on Canvas