So This Is Permanence and gay lawyers...

Students Rose Parish, Lucy Somers and Pip Preece will consider portraiture through the medium of painting in an innovative way. The face of the painter (if we are talking individually as well as relationally) can create an emotional, destructive and forceful piece of work that can always look back at us. We know painting is far from dead- in fact we know it is still one of the most widely practiced and philosophical contributions to an endless amount of artistic mediums that survive today.

I met Lisa Who last summer whilst I took on a studio down in Victoria Street whilst I was working at TATE for the Picasso exhibition. Her connection and knowledge surrounding the art world is quite vast, plus she is pretty down to earth. We all decided on using curve gallery (owned by Lisa and her partner Wayne) for a show. The show went pretty well (although i went half way through to go to the pub) – the fact it became three of us in such a small space worked out better and the curating was a great experience to handle not just with such a small group but also for myself. What I wanted more than anything was a strong painters show which will lead to more strong painter shows around Liverpool for the next few years hopefully. I do think it was missing.

I disagreed with the show having any connection with a module- although we are "marked" in a sense on the course. I found that extremely difficult to undertake after the show because I believe people were more concerned with that academic ideal of it, when in fact, it's really part of you as a artist and a larger experience with your practise. 

There is a sporadic sense of work around Liverpool at the moment and in the UK. You question how much work is really being produced and what it is about is really unpredictable (not a bad thing.) I was thinking about this constantly before Berlin because in order to create a painters show there always has to be work available and ready to hang whereas for the Liverpool academy of arts show you had young artists with found pieces, dialogue, text, film mostly quickly done. The most important thing is the constant re-evaluation and further understanding of what you are dealing with. 

In the nature of painting, you have a condemned amount of shows to ‘hangings on the wall’ . . . but I don’t condemn this to our show because I think the experience was needed early. So, back to thinking about shows I’d love to do open shows where paintings are placed directly in the floor (so you can walk/view from below) or travelling around large trucks on the side for a day or a couple of small pieces in a black cab.

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