Research: The portrait, surveillance, looking at looking. Part 2
Throughout the summer, I found myself visiting as many exhibitions as possible that was permissible with the restrictions of Covid in place.
As mentioned in the previous blog (What exactly is Painting October 16th), I wanted to find ways to step away from my painting style restrictions, which can reside in the exact replication of an already produced image. I have always seen as influential upon my practice as a painter, Jenny Saville, Lucian Freud and Jonathan Yeo. Their style and attention to detail have always impressed me. Their work acts as an indicator of the power one can harness to bring the real into a secondary stand-alone realm.
So, it is with this intrigue that I have always approached painting. When I consider Alberto Giacometti's paintings that look like preparatory drawings, I find they allude to how image outside of some exact representation can imbue a notion of essence. Below are some examples of the artists mentioned above and how my latest paintings draw parallels to their work.
Lucian Freud has had the most significant influence on my painting. It is evident in the comparison photo below (fig. 1), and from the numerous shows I have attended, there are many similarities in style and content. Much of my painting has consisted of using a fine hair sable brush to produce a close to the actual image effect. Upon researching Freud's early career, I found he too was constricted to an exactitude by where he states, "My eyes were completely going mad, sitting down and not being able to move. Small brushes, fine canvas. Sitting down used to drive me more and more agitated. I felt I wanted to free myself from this way of working" [i]
This research into how painters evaluate their practice mirrors my concerns and processes.
During this research for why my work resides in the figurative category, I came across a quote by Arthur C Danto in the book Art + Objects by Graham Harman – 'Yet it remains striking that Danto opposes the theory of art as mimesis insofar as he [Clement Greenburg] links mimesis with content: "Taken as a theory of art, what the imitation theory amounts to is a reduction of the artworks to its content, everything else being supposedly invisible…"' [ii]
This review of the portrait on canvass led me to find a meaning beyond what Harman coins "Optical data". [iii]
In a talk given By Danto for the John Adams Institute at the Van Gogh Museum in 2002, [iv] Danto draws how the painter Philip Guston "began to see his earlier type of painting is somehow no longer morally appropriate or acceptable given the way politics have gone with the world; if there's to be art, it should not be beautiful since the world as it is, does not deserve beauty […] Beautifiers are collaborationists." [v]
This questioning of moral content has caused me to reflect on the subjectivities within my painting. When considering how I approach composition directed by my own 'male gaze.'
Fig. 1
Lucian Freud
Reflection with two children (self portrait)
Oil on canvas
91 x 91 cm
Fig. 2
Stuart Lee
After Lucian
(2020)
Jenny Saville (fig. 3) is a painter whose style and technique set her out as a traditionalist because her adherence to the discipline of painting has helped cement the adoration of painterly craftsmanship enacted in her oeuvre.
She is celebrated for her ability to produce works that challenge bodily convention and provoke a dialectical setting that encourages further exploration of how these challenges empower an emerging alternative viewpoint that considers, without sanction, the male gaze to be, at the very least, de-intensified.
Regarding the male gaze as an attribute that directs my work, I find this makes my own choice of subject matter problematic. As shown above with Guston’s view of how ones own subjectivities present themselves within wider political and social discourses, It is hard at the moment to know what to paint.
Fig. 3
Jenny Saville
Fulcrum
Oil on canvas
103 x 192 inches
1999
While trying to replicate Saville's style, my research led to the painter John Squires (fig. 4), who uses current app technologies to produce 'glitched' images. These indicators point to a direction my work is taking. Rather than focus on the 'content' alone and the subjective reaction my painting is then used to demarcate, this use of process reveals a new approach to the act of making.
Fig. 4
John Squire
Untitled
Oil on canvas
100 x 75.5 cm
2018
Fig. 5
Stuart Lee
Glitchfield II
(2020)
Outcomes:
Something evident within my painting, and this is somewhere where I see room for wider exploration, is that the step away from a more concise mimesis lends to a more freer ‘style’. My perfectionism is closely tied into my approach to the production of the composition. What becomes evident in my method is the strict adherence to the image that I work from. When I produce a photo, make an edit to an image, there are elements of natural happenstance within the production technology that rely on, that results in an image which then becomes the challenge, in the context of using the choice of materials that go towards trying to best represent the qualities and elements of any working image. It is very interesting that i’m still immensely tentative to step into a more interpretive style of painting.
One way I found to experiment with my method, and I would assess it produced successful results, was to use a projector.
Taking a snapshot of an image I had procured, I found I could see beforehand, how the composition of painting may appear during the process of composing the overall ‘look’ of the painting.
Below is an gallery of the projection process.
Click on images and then hover over images to reveal further evaluations.
