PART 5 Manifesto – post 1

PART 5 MANIFESTO -post 1

My work has continued to respond to the Brazilian forest fire devastation and it has raised ‘process’ questions for me in regard to composition and abstraction through chance. It has all to do with ‘cropping’. I can best explain it through the images themselves.

In this work focused on the forest fires, I painted a very loose intuitive image responding mainly to feelings rather than the visual look of the fires. Several layers of painting were built up over an initial layering of masking. Very experimental!

Then began the cropping. Using the phone I took many photos of parts of the painting and because of the layering of the paint the cropped sections revealed some really lovely and exciting images.

 

My question, however, is about the legitimacy of these section images as final pieces. I guess this question will apply mainly to abstraction. I love many of these images and they convey for me essential elements of the work around the devastation of the fires. But they are purely accidental…or are they? I note that on the feedback for Part 2, the tutor touches on this concept of cropping…”The most obviously successful moment in this submission seems to be the cropped details you culled from your ‘ugly painting’. The reason they are more successful for me in terms of your own stated intention in that they are the ones with the least drawing, and the ones which – through cropping- you have created simpler and bolder compositions that allow me as the viewer to experience the optical effects of space and dynamic juxtaposition.” When I first started cropping images, I had expected that I could work further from them, expecting that the ideas about construction and composition could be copied but I have found that this is not possible. These cropped images carry an absence of self which can’t be imitated. As soon as I try to reconstruct them they lose the spontaneity and energy and become forced.

I am looking to find ways to bring that intuitive, spontaneous energy into my work. At the moment I’m using my hands as painting tools, I’m working on wet surfaces so that the paint is less controlled, I’m using other tools such as sticks, rags, used plastic cards. I may also move the painting through 360 degrees so that I don’t get bogged down with only one direction of travel. I draw and paint with my left hand and not the normal right so that I have less or no control. I find that amazing things are happening when you are prepared to allow the unknown into the painting.

But my question still remains! Where does the chance happening, the tiny cropped detail, the incredible combination of dripped colours merging, fit into art dialogue? Chance? Or perhaps something which can’t be specified…