Very Base

Recently I’ve been thinking about iterations. I think it makes sense to think about iterations when considering our familial routines and rhythms: doing the same things, using the same objects. I’ve been avoiding spending money on new materials, so after running out of water-based oil paints I’ve just been using up my acrylics. Any acrylics and household paints, actually I’ve been relishing in the nastiest ones with the garish or washed out tints and watery consistency. Not in a fatalistic, devil may care way but more in a, these materials are not expensive so let’s play sort of way. My supports have been paper, hardback book covers and 3-euro 30 x 40 cm canvases from dealz. All very base.

But I would like to embody a looseness, because sometimes I feel the weight of things. I thought of this recently when regarding a garden chair which had been sitting out in the rain for days. It has slightly mouldy pillows from bad storage over the winter. I read a Lydia Davis story called ‘The Old Dictionary’ where she berates herself for not taking care of her son as well as she does her old dictionary. Why do we not slow down and take better care? The chair has now dried out and still holds us solidly.

I’ve been taking pictures, lots of pictures with my M35 Kodak camera, and on my phone. I’ve discovered a long shutter speed on my phone camera which creates interesting effects with a contrast in sharpness and blurring. I use a little photo printer I got for Christmas. I paint from these photographs, stripping back the shapes, seeing them in error, altering the colours. What am I seeing? The moment of capture? The subject? I am thinking about the subject; spring is welcome here with the promise of more play outdoors.

And I have become brutal with colour. I’ve stripped back the colour wheel to only allow myself from yellow to blue. I cheat slightly by introducing siennas and ochres. I like limitations, to set arbitrary rules. But what has surprised me recently is people are slipping away from my paintings. What has almost always contained a figure, or an allusion to a figure, is now being left aside and it surprises me: when a figure leaves.

I’m still lingering on Moyra Davey, I need to keep reminding myself that it is ok to just make work here, in this house and its surrounds, just to tell the stories of our day to day: no grand narrative. I rewatched a great video from the Louisiana Channel in which she elaborates on how she treats her apartment like a studio, as ‘a room of one’s own.’ It allows her to zone in on the specificity of small details, the dust collecting on the spine of a book. Details that might usually go unnoticed.