A contribution from fellow artist and guest blogger Matthew Askey
These three paintings happened accidentally in a way (very accidentally in the case of one of them, more on that to follow…) because I’ve just finished one series of paintings after several weeks and am waiting to start another, so I had a natural ‘gap’ to fill. I’ve discovered that it is often in this way that some new creative path opens up. Artists have a tendency to be a bit pushy and domineering with our approach to work at times so it is sobering and refreshing to live even more dangerously than usual and let more things ‘come in’. It’s important to see these unexpected ideas as the gifts they are. I’ve often found this hard to recognise when the gift is just there being given, even though they are usually plainly obvious later on looking back!
I have just finished a series of 15 paintings on the theme of Gethsemane (depicting the events of Maundy Thursday of Holy Week – the ‘Agony in the Garden’) to be exhibited at Wakefield Cathedral during Lent 2009. Helen and myself are awaiting the birth of our first child (due on 17th April) and I’d planned on working on a long series, as any doting father might, of paintings of the new baby…
…As I waited I realised that I wanted to do it now - getting a bit excited by the whole thing I think – and the nearest model I had was Helen. Put like that it sounds like a bit of a second choice but It turned out to be an important step for me. Alongside the more public ‘Prayer Paintings’ I’ve been working on has grown the need to produce a private or more personal series of prayer paintings. Other than one recent self-portrait these three very small paintings (about 10” diameter) of Helen represent my first experiments with light and life in a domestic setting. My first family paintings, with all the possibilities that could be explored there! I’m particularly thinking perhaps of Rembrandt and the intimate paintings by the Israeli/Parisian artist Avigdor Arikha.
Two of these new pictures of Helen are profiles almost filling the tiny panels and one is more direct, looking back, it is the biggest gift of the three in many ways as I nearly abandoned the painting several times. This painting started out life being based on a full length photograph of Helen pregnant; taking just the head I struggled to make the left side of the portrait work. The right side was working fine…it’s these sort of moments for a painter that can be profoundly frustrating, as the thin paint muddies, the moment passes, the attempts to link the whole form by glazing, brushing over, rubbing back a little; the synthesis that had held the image together only a few moments before falls apart for the umpteenth time…I’d then tried to throw the left side of the face into shadow, an obvious thing to do when working on a dark ground, but this didn’t work after many attempts. What could I do? Well, looking at the painting you can see I added the curtain, completely changing the meaning of the image (and for the better I hope). I would never have thought of starting out with an image like that, but it seemed to need to do this, to become this picture that you now see, and I let it, gladly. It now takes on a mysterious quality, perhaps visible even in my poor photo (with the blacks reflecting light back – sorry).
The more I paint the more I realise that I paint to discover something I didn’t know before; the painting always teaches me something, it is a surprise. I think this is what Francis Bacon meant when he said ‘I paint because I want to be excited’…It is in the discovery of what we didn’t know or think possible before we started that the painting lives, and continues to live in the mind of the viewer, sharing in that surprising act of discovery in creation that the painter stumbled across. All I can hope to do as a painter is to be there, to enable a meditation on a special moment (and all moments are of value) through a meeting of the inner world of our hearts, our prayers, and the exterior world around us. This is for me at the heart of the mystery of all art; to explore where that inner and outer world meets. It is a making special of our finite lives; a making sacred of what we are…
Thank you Matthew, contributions are still very welcome.....email me at [email protected]
The new banner is a detail from one of my favourite digital images made a few years ago, it's part of a series just called 'Nature', they make great screensavers, if you would like one just email me and I will send you a higher res copy.
