Chasing tigers

The good news is that my latest painting, the Tiger Bride, is almost finished. The bad news is that the human propensity to fiddle is potentially endless. And so it is that I have been hovering over the canvas with a tiny brush, making minute changes that no-one is likely to notice. Or even if they did notice, it’s doubtful whether it would make any difference to their reading of the image. Still, one is compelled to fiddle, even though there has to be a point where you say ‘enough! the bloody thing is finished’.

So why all the last minute angsting over trivial details of virtually nil visual impact? A good question! It’s partly a desire to make the painting as whole as it can be. When I get to this point in a painting, the big decisions are no longer clear (such as where the large forms go and what they look like). It’s just thousands of tiny little decisions that could go one way or the other. For example, does the veil need some ribbons blowing around it to increase the sense of dynamism? It’s essentially quite a static image, painted with small, tight brushstrokes, and the ribbons could help add movement. Or flow.

And if I add more detail to the Cape Barren Geese, will this help jump them forward into the foreground? At the moment they’re hovering tonally on the same plane as the stone wall. If I do add detail, what do I add? I had this idea of dressing them in natty little green velvet capes with lace bonnets. But if I do this, will it look incorrigibly naff? More specifically, will it take the image too far down the road towards children’s book illustration, bringing a kind of Wind in the Willows tendency into something that is supposed to be pretty but also ambiguous and hopefully potent.

As you can see, the green velvet capes, complete with frilly neck-lines, made the cut. Their colour (chromium oxide) is too buzzy, much too high a key for the rest of the painting, so next time I’m in the studio I’ll calm them down with a pale tint.

The other reason why it’s sometimes hard to finish paintings is more oblique. One gets so fond of them, they dominate your thoughts for a period of time, and it’s hard to let go. I’m visually monogamous: I like working intensely on just one image at a time. I find that flicking between images, though productive, dilutes the intensity required to make anything good. But this is just me, everyone works differently.

I am however fine with working up the underpainting layers of other canvases while I’m concentrating on one main image. This is a shot of a painting, I’ve nicknamed it church, that will eventually show a small, squat colonial era church with two children at the front, possibly holding animals. I return to this image, again and again, which is odd as I don’t even particularly like American Gothic. 

In a moment of clarity in the studio yesterday, I worked out that most of my images talk about female power. I was musing about the church image, and thinking that I may try painting a 3/4 view of the building, showing some nice sandstone details along the side. But for some reason I couldn’t break away from the image of the church, with a centrally placed door, and a curving path leading up to the entrance. Eventually I decided that the door acts as a kind of female phallic symbol, both a literal and a metaphorical gateway.

This is the photograph, of a Tasmanian church, that I’m using as reference. There’s something terribly mawish about this door.

In other news, I’ve repainted the background to the Dodo with children in snowstorm image (it will probably have a better title eventually, but that’s its working name). I wanted the three figures to form a triangle, and visually operate as a pieta, with the human figures a descending series of forms curved over the dodo, the solid base of the triangle. Anyway, the whole group was off centre, and it wasn’t working.

I also abandoned my plan to paint a mountain, Hobart’s Mount Wellington, in the background. Firstly because I didn’t have decent reference material (despite my many trips to Tasmania to gather reference material, I had somehow forgotten to photograph the mountain that looms over the small city). And secondly because it would have closed in the pictorial space at a time when I’m trying to open it up and play with depth.

Here’s the underpainting of another image, it will eventually depict two girls standing on a beach, wearing colonial era ball gowns and animal masks. One will have her hands raised, pushing the mask off her face (perceiving the history of the place), a pose that dates back, at least in my imagination, to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. I’m looking forward to this painting, imagining it as gelato coloured, all light pink, olive green, white and pale grey.

Surprisingly, one of my favourite parts of Tiger Bride was painting the lace. If you get up close, there’s some quite odd symbols and patterns woven into the pattern, including Pacific tribal motifs and things that look like crop circles. In retrospect, the lace looked better when parts of it were left sheer, as opposed to covered with ’embroidery’, but I went a bit OCD and didn’t notice this until I’d finished. At this stage I thinking that I can use lace as the visual motif that ties this exhibition together: I like the way it both obscures and consolidates forms. Incidentally the exhibition that these paintings are for, Strange Tales, has been moved back a couple of months. It will now open at Despard Gallery, Tasmania, in late April 2012.

Today’s tiger

For those of you have been following the progress of my latest painting, Tiger Bride, you’ll be relieved to hear that the damned thing is nearly finished. Today was spent fiddling with minor details such as a the rose petal shower (the petals themselves, up close, look a bit like autopsy tissue samples), the girl’s hands and the tiger’s peculiar harness. I also painted the first layer of the bride’s veil, trying to use the translucent layer of paint to ‘free up’ some of the rather stiff brushwork that characterises the rest of the image.

After fiddling with the painting for most of the morning, I began work on another three canvases, all more or less the same size as Tiger, about 4 foot or 5 foot squarish. One is a funny image of a couple of Victorian looking children cuddling a dodo in a snowstorm (just can’t get enough of those extinct species!) Then there’s a seascape with two girls on a beach, one reaching her arms up to push an animal mask off her face. And the final image is a recurring obsession, a lot like Grant Wood’s famous American Gothic, of two figures standing outside an old church. I’ve painted this latter image so many times that today, when I was drawing it up on the canvas, it literally felt like I was tracing the image.

The process of painting extinct species is oddly unsettling. First of all I trawled through old photographs, and representations, of thylacines to try and work out what the Tasmanian Tiger really looked like. As I mentioned in a previous post, the discovery of their ‘stiff, unwaggable tail’ was strangely exciting, as was an old memoir written by an Englishwoman living on the island during the colonial era. It was moving experience to read, though described in dismissive terms, about the sight of a female Tiger hunting with her pups, nose to the ground as she tracked  prey. “A pretty picture” noted the writer with a sniff, unaware that she was documenting a dying breed.

Similarly the Dodo representations tell you as much about the human artist as they do about the animal. Some dodo images are butterball fat, with enviably chunky drumsticks and squat little legs. These images scream “I am food: eat me!” to the viewer. One look at chubby birdy and you can tell in a flash why they went extinct. They’re the Colonel Sanders icons of the Age of Discovery. Hmmnnn…. that advertising jingle springs to mind, “I feel like Dodo tonight, like Dodo tonight”.

Other images show a more graceful elongated duck. One memorable etching depicts a stretched duck-like bird with legs firmly anchored under its bottom, making it unlikely that the bird could ever walk, let alone run away from potential predators. Dodos are variously imagined as deformed pelicans, bulked up macaws or as an exotic version of the Christmas turkey.

 

Tiger, tiger, tiger

The Tiger Bride is gradually being completed, or as it so often feels with a painting, finishing itself. Like the cycle of a typical love affair, images hit the stage where there is nothing more to be learned/nothing left to discover/nothing more to give, and this is usually when you decide the painting is finished.

These photographs were taken over a period of at least two weeks, possibly three, I’ve lost count. And to complicate things, they’re not necessarily in order…

The snake resembles the scroll at the bottom of a medieval manuscript, it was re-drawn to fix the weird flattish angle on the last curve from the left. I had intended for the snake to be facing the other way, as nearly every other creature is pointing left, but it wasn’t to be.

Deciding that the red of the dress was too flat a colour, and rather cliched, I moved it towards a rose pink. It now looks uncomfortably like bubbling lava or a river of blood.

The tiger sporting his bridle and natty harness.

I’m currently using reference material, for the dress and hairstyle, from Tasmanian colonial paintings. My favourite era was early on, before more skilled painters began to emigrate to the new colony. There’s a kind of freshness about the early stuff, an earnestly naive attempt to ‘get it right’ and follow the fashions of far away Europe, a well intentioned dislocation. In the early paintings, sleek racehorses float a few inches off impossibly green grass; a salon painter labours over the painting of a glass, a piece of lace, in a desperate attempt to show that he can ‘do it’; family portraits show each person from a slightly different perspective; and native animals are this weird concoction of familiar species: a kangaroo typically has the ears of a rabbit and the legs of a hound.

 

The tiger bride continues…

More updates on the painting I’m currently working on in my studio, The tiger bride, a largish oil on canvas of about 4′ x 5′. Like so many artworks, it is nothing like I had imagined it would be, and by the time it’s finished, I expected it will bear little resemblance to the original sketch.

I hadn’t actually intended to paint something so detailed, complex and well, labour intensive. Most of the time now I’m working with very small brushes, it feels like you are embroidering the surface of the canvas with a tiny needle. I had a couple of visual flashes the other day, the first was how I wanted the figure to look (kind of dewy and airbrushed, like fashion photography or a high kitsch religious icon) and the second was of the tiger (greyish silver, every hair gleaming and distinct, like a cross between natural history illustration and the painful sincerity of naive art).

The intricacies of the surface reflect my long standing fascinating with Persian miniatures, where patterning is used to show spatial depth, and every inch of the picture’s surface is laden (groaning even) with detail. I’m interested in what happens when you take this kind of visual language and use it on a large image. My desire is to create something that is strange and claustrophobic, almost hallucinogenic, but it may always fail and come across as extreme naffness: a Disney fairy tale stage set.

It’s that old thing about wanting to quote traditions without being subsumed by them. So I want the painting to reference the visual traditions of forms such as colonial art, naive painting and children’s book illustration but still be something separate and distinct. And with a darker edge: if it’s just a pretty image, then for me the thing doesn’t work. A subtext needs to be there, but neither obscure or obvious, balanced somewhere between the two extremes.

Another old idea, that of a trinity of figures. In this image I’ve just started sketching in the bride’s ‘handmaiden’s’, actually two Cape Barren Geese, indigenous to Tasmania. This is quietly humorous as Cape Barren Geese, from what I can remember from a camping trip on Maria Island, are cantankerous, stumpy and cross.

I dug up some more reference material for the Tasmanian Tiger. I’d been using an old black and white postcard, a photograph of the last couple of Tigers in captivity in Hobart Zoo, and a colour postcard of their skins. Then I found an early artist’s drawing that suggests that they had this line of white fur running underneath their jaws, down their chests, under the belly and extending through to a narrow line on the front of their rear haunches. I also found out that the tail was ‘stiff and unwaggable’, like a kangaroos, a piece of information I found oddly exciting. It was the word ‘unwaggable’ that did it.

More decorative elements have been added to this version; there’s some clematis on a bush to the left (from a book on Tasmanian flora). A proud notation states that they found ‘this magnificent display’ next to the East Derwent Highway. The flowers make this green foliage look even more like a screen, rather than a three dimensional form, I’m currently musing whether I like this or if it just looks wrong. A painting I worked on a couple of years ago, The Waterhole, featured a group of lollipop trees, each round circle of foliage operating as a series of flat, decorative overlapping shapes.

My sense is that this painting is nearly finished, although as I said earlier, I’m not sure what its final form will be. I’m still looking for some other element (perhaps the veil, perhaps the girl’s hair, perhaps a mask) that will make sense of all the painting’s disparate elements. Something that will make it potent. At the moment, there’s this feeling that it’s like a car body without an engine.

Finally, on the topic of how art has the potential to send one completely around the twist, check out this article from GQ. It just made me wanna get into the movie business!

Day one

Another well intentioned attempt to follow a painting from ‘cradle to grave’, or rather from the first sketches through to the end product. The painting I have chosen is about 4′ x 5′ (must get into metric one day) and I have a special affection for it, although currently it remains untitled. It’s part of a series I’m working on for Despard Gallery, Tasmania, in preparation for my next solo exhibition with them in early 2012.

Strange Tales will include about six large paintings like this one, a number of smaller bird canvases, and perhaps some large scale charcoal drawings. I’ve found that I’m missing drawing, particularly drawing from life, the immediacy and the fluency of drawing media. Although I’m still working it out, most of these paintings will be specifically about Tasmania, the island’s history and its colonial art, this constant sense of the past and the present colliding.

This is the canvas with its first coat of acrylic paint. While trying to replicate something of the style of either colonial or naive art, I’m sticking to some of the more traditional painting methods, like starting from a pinkish ground (usually closer to a red/brown or pale terracotta, but I want these images to be sickly sweet, right from the beginning). The image is of a small girl, wearing colonial era garb, riding a Tasmanian Tiger. A young boy holds the reins.

The initial sketch, executed with willow charcoal. At this point I’m referring quite constantly to the smaller sketch in my journal (pictured above).

Wrote the words ‘delicate subjugation’ on the top right of the canvas.

Introduce washes of acrylic paint to start picking out the tones.

White acrylic paint goes on…

End of the first day!