Blue Slippy

I started this painting on an A1 piece of paper, working in washes from a photograph. I wanted more weight from it, in paint, and more distance from the photo. So I cut it up and mounted it on three small canvases, 30 x 40 cm. I have discovered this glue which dries completely clear but is cheap and easy to use, like PVA but better.

I wanted to centralise the door and destabilise the composition of the painting, to make it feel like something that divides the boys, as if they are waiting for it to open, for an arrival. Born Slippy was in my head. It kind of rhymes with Blue Slippy, and it feels like a coming-of-age song. It also resonates with painting: its repetitiveness and lucidity, and slippage with paint. I want the boys to appear as if they are slipping from the weight of those blue beams of light.

I got to the stage the other day where I thought I was almost finished, or maybe just done with it. But then I reasoned that I should stay and carry on working with it, layering the paint. If I ruin it, if it goes further than I want, that is okay. So we are playing the long game, me and Blue Slippy. I want to see if I can balance loose light layers with thick gloopy ones.

I used phthalo and cerulean blues. I always think these are closest to the sea in my mind, but then I look at the sea and realise I must be thinking of elsewhere, the Mediterranean or something, a fantasy. I intended to channel Luc Tuymans, to try and make a painting in a day, but I do not think that is possible for me right now, with pick ups and dinners and everything. So it makes sense that the painting is fragmented. All the same, I would like to challenge myself to do this sometime, to walk away when something is unfinished and resist the urge to go back to it.

Let your feelings slip boy

But never your mask boy

Born Slippy lyrics, Underworld

Blue notes

I sit watching my son bobbing in a blue hat in a blue pool, wearing blue goggles over his eyes.

My wedding dress was powder blue, in a material which imitates silk. I bought it from the atelier section of a high street store. The word atelier made it feel special.

Baby blues does not properly describe the feeling of sadness you experience after having a baby. It makes it sound like a soft blanket or a floating weightlessness in a small pool of water. Instead, I would colour the feeling grey, with the impenetrable flatness of an overcast day.

When my grandmother died, she left me and my sister her collection of Bristol blue glass. In her house she had it on the windowsill where, at certain times of day, the sun could shine through it and cast ultramarine around the room.

My mum, my sister and my daughter all have Irish blue eyes.

My parents’ shed doors are both identical Winsor blue. Side by side you wonder what is beyond each. If you chose one, you may wish you had chosen the other.

When I was little, my sister told me that a blue room in a house is always the one that is haunted.

The blue of the sky where I am from is a different hue to the one where I live.

Outside, in certain places, blue can take up so much space it feels infinite.

How many nurses have told me I have tiny veins? Your veins appear blue due to an optical illusion caused by how light interacts with our skin. Perhaps I do not refract enough light.

Experiments

I have not bought or developed any 35mm film recently, and I miss it, but I have been experimenting with my phone camera. I got some great shots of my son in motion, building a dirt ramp for his bike. I smeared the lens with my lip balm, which is tinted red, and this gave a blurry quality which seems to accentuate the sense of movement.

I finished another slab. I worked on it at the same time as Blue Slippy, moving between the two. I am finding these exciting because they feel like pure play, and in many ways they are quite ugly. I would love an official art person to come into my workspace and tell me if they are in fact slabs, and if they are any good. I feel like I want some of their energy to filter through to the other paintings, which are a lot safer.

At the moment there is the ghost outline of a gessoed piece of paper on my wall. I have been dreaming of filling it with a large canvas, but I am procrastinating, so the ghost remains.