It’s officially Spring and as I look out of the window there is the flicker of snowflakes gently falling. It had better make its mind up soon as we’ve got cricket in a fortnight or at least that’s what I think I heard on the radio, although looking out of the window surely I must be wrong.
Anyway in uncertain times it’s good to have something a little more reliable so I’ve been working on some paintings of dead animals, a squirrel and two partridges to be exact. I know it seems like an odd subject but there are a number of reasons why I’m finding them fascinating.
Firstly I suppose once you transcend the inherent pathos of a sad little creature’s death, then you can start to look a bit more dispassionately and in my case notice the subtle and lovely transitions of colour and tone within the fur and feathers. You can spend a good amount of time just looking at the different textures, how they catch the light and how this in turn describes the form of each creature and then how this form then suggests the dead weight.
You can also play around with context, for example, how do you present this object to give it both meaning and dignity? What about scale, my paintings are above life-size so the animals don’t look dinky or cute so if you do paint them bigger, how much detail should you record and how accurate should that recording be. Where does the art start and the natural history illustration end and does it really matter?
What about historical precedent? All those incredible Dutch Still Lifes with great oak tables creaking under the weight of dead swans, widgeons, ducks, partridges, pheasants, pigeons, geese, turkeys, fish, foul and fruit these incredible ostentatious depictions of fabulous wealth and greed need to be at least looked at if not overtly acknowledged. To our delicate sensibilities they appear like killing fields, gross, unnecessary, excessive and callous, on the whole I suspect we don’t approve. And yet I can’t help but drool at the sheer skill of these master technicians, just look at how they catch the iridescent glint of a peacock’s feather whilst simultaneously delicately recording the dead leaden stare of its eye in repose. The feathers ironically shimmer with life whilst the body inelegantly sprawled speaks only of death; these painters were at the absolute pinnacle of their craft and through the clarity of their language even now they tell us powerful eternal truths about mortality. Blimey I wish I could just do a fraction of what they routinely did every day of the week.
In my own little humble way I’m giving it a go and I’m trying to invest these sad creatures with some dignity but then again most serious figurative art is trying to do that, the dignity part not the sad creatures bit.
It can go wrong and this week I’ve had a bit of a disaster. I will keep it short and try and avoid any hint of self pity although that might not be easy.
I made a painting of a red legged partridge on its back with a muted but accurate and real landscape at the top. The landscape part was my favourite bit, in reality, it is a lovely place we often walk the dogs, however the partridge bit of the painting, was problematic from the start. It just didn’t look right and the more I looked the more it became John Cleese’s parrot, Michael Palin’s Norwegian Blue, you know the one and it was well and truly dead.
I persuaded myself the problems were all compositional and could easily be solved with the addition of an extra strip at the bottom of the painting. The painting is acrylic on paper collage glued onto canvas, so the solution seemed easy enough. Take the canvas off the stretcher and glue it onto a wooden panel of the correct dimensions with the additional space at the bottom. Simple.
Off we go, canvas comes off stretcher without a hitch, panel is generously rollered with strong PVA glue, canvas is carefully positioned and vigorously rollered with hard roller to fix position. Voila, job done, soon the dead parrot will transform wondrously into a lustrous partridge, boldly painted shadows elegantly fading off to the bottom of the newly proportioned panel. All is well time for tea.
Not so fast Mr Smug, whilst tea is slurped great mountains and ridges have formed and the canvas looks like a child’s model of tectonic plate theory as evidenced in the Alps. In other words what was flat a few minutes ago is now rumpled and bumpy as hell. This is a disaster, weeks and weeks of work are buckling in front of our very eyes. Together Elaine and I leap at the panel and start to tear off the canvas, I promise you all those ads where the glue is so strong you can hang a man of generous proportions off an airplane, well they are true, absolutely true because here was a man with a great round red face pulling with all his might at this canvas, trying to separate it from it’s panel and I swear on all that is pure, this bugger would not budge an inch, not a millimetre.
We pulled and tore at it like things possessed and together bracing the panel with our knees the canvas very, very gradually peeled off, stuttering and snapping as the mighty glue begrudgingly gave up its captive. After many minutes of this fantastically stubborn labour with backs aching, muscles burning, faces red and ears popping, the canvas finally came off. The glue sat like a million angry spikes on the panel and the canvas looked like a well wrung dish cloth, from a near disaster we snatched a certain disaster, it was time for more tea.
I still like the landscape but now it looks both muted and knackered and as such it has the charm of a retrieved fragment, which of course it is. On reflection if it were presented as it is, unrestored in a smart box frame with a fancy title alluding to the de-construction of painting and the demise of allegory it might just have a second life as Art or I might just accept that it is in fact a dead parrot, a good old Norwegian Blue. In fact there are some interesting philosophical points to be considered, did it ever stop being art, was there a transition from art to rubbish to art, if so how and finally how the hell do they make glue that strong. I’m off to Poland at the weekend and I will be visiting a school where I daresay through the medium of sign language and diagrams we shall continue our philosophical pondering. I can feel a Joseph Beuy's moment coming on, in fact I actually do have a dead hare, honest. Google Joseph Beuy's, you'll get it!
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