Table of Contents
Reading
- Kenneth Clark (1997) The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form. (Reprint Edition) New York, NY: Fine Communications.
- Alain de Botton and John Armstrong (2016) Art as Therapy. (s.l.): Phaidon Press.
- Boston’s Apollo: Thomas McKeller and John Singer Sargent (2020) Boston, MA: The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.
- No. 605: Gio Swaby, ‘Coded’ (June 8 2023) In: Modern Art Notes Podcast. Directed by Tyler Green 140 minutes. At: https://manpodcast.com/portfolio/no-605-gio-swaby-coded/
Theme and Concept
The name of this project came first: Recovery is a Quiet Thing. This name speaks to how we focus on the grief, pain or struggle that we’ve experienced and we may not notice that recovery has become recovered until after the fact. It sneaks into our lives.
This project revolves around my ruminations on Grief, Struggle and Recovery as it relates to events in my life over the last few years and my attempts to come to terms with it.
Inspired by the student collaboration that I have been participating in, I thought it might be interesting to treat these paintings as a series of responses in a conversation between myself and the model. The process went as follows:
- I provided a wide collection of prompt words to the model
- The model responded to those words to create facial expressions, or full body poses, which I then drew in pastel.
- I then took those pastel drawings, and a constrained set of prompt words, to inspire each painting.
The paintings in the main body of work had to adhere to these constraints:
- All had to involve mixed media, notably building up a surface from newspaper. These papers represented my career as the foundation for the ruminations.
- Each was to be painted in acrylic.
- They all had to use prompt words from Grief, Struggle or Recovery (or combinations thereof)
- They all must be the same size at 75 x 75cm.
Acts of Binding
As we navigate our grief, and struggle with events in the past, we may find ourselves in progressively worse situations. We bind ourselves with our own actions. Perhaps we need to find ourselves at the bottom before we can realize that there is a better path.
This painting layers poured acrylic over stock listings from the financial posts, then builders more traditional brushwork in acrylic over top. Metal staples are used as shackles — chains that wouldn’t hold together, if we simply chose to pull free.
In the composition I was considering the Odalisque, and the role of the nude as object/objectified — probably evolving out of my reading of Kenneth Clark.
The Things We Hold Onto
As we move from grief into recovery, we might get caught in ruminating on past cherished memories that we may not yet be ready to let go. And yet, recovery can’t happen until we can reconcile with our past and move on.
Leveraging rags and acrylics to create an energetic sky, against which the figure is placed like landscape and immovable. Is the figure asleep, or meditating? Are they becoming part of the landscape, or are they forming out of it to become something new.
The line of their shoulder and arm is raw, bloody, and peels away from the panel in layers — the wounds that come with recovery
Daily Affirmations
What shape does recovery take? Until it has come to pass, we keep chasing. We keep working. We keep traveling forward trying to attain something whose form we cannot imagine.
On top of layers of torn newspaper, two overlapping people are rendered only in line. They are incomplete and somewhat formless. The overlapping might convey repetition and time. The many attempts to define and plan for a goal that can’t quite be conceived of.
Recovery is work. It requires us to not be passive, to make the daily choice to progress and find a better path.
And Coda: A place to step off from, a place to step onto
During the final phases of this project, I took a flight across the country to attend a wedding. I spent much of that flight looking out the window at vast sunlit cloudscapes. As we passed over the prairies, farmland and rivers glittered with brief flashes of sunlight. As we reached where prairie becomes the foothills of the Rockies, the clouds rose up into great swirling forms.
Here, I realized, that I had changed. I wasn’t ruminating on the events of the last few years. Instead, I was looking forward and planning my next projects at work and looking forward to being with my team again. I realized I’d recovered — it had snuck in, just as the title of this project suggested it would.
I can’t know if my work on these paintings was the therapy I needed to find perspective. I can’t discount the possibility.
As a coda to this project, this painting took form in my sketchbook during my visit to the west coast. Memorializing that moment of realization.
Reflection
Overall, I’m quite pleased with the results of this project. I was able to leverage a number of new-to-me processes, and successfully realized paintings using a medium that I generally am not comfortable with (Acrylics). I think I found useful ways of working with this medium, where I have struggled badly in the past.
Denyse Thomasos definitely influenced my way of working here. One of the exhibit I had attended showed her studio practice — many small plastic pots each containing a single mixed colour. Here I was reminded about how I work in pastels, and how freeing I find that when working at speed. I replicated this in acrylics, while working, having small dishes of mixed tone available (though I often broke this in order to get differing effects).
The material explorations in the rest of this section had huge impact on the outcomes, and my comfort level in applying them.
On Self Portraiture
The figure in the paintings was all painted, on some level, from my work with Matt. However, as a bearded man roughly my height, it could be argued that many of the images became proxies for myself. Certainly the thematic aspects of this project were about myself. I suppose, in this way, I’m copying what I read in Boston’s Apollo: Painting my intended subject’s face onto the model’s body.
Artifact or Process
Thinking about Modern Art Notes No. 605, there is a moment where Gio Swaby mentions that Art is the process and the physical artifact is “just” the end of that process. Prior to this project my intention was creating artifacts — the goal was the physical thing I could put on my wall. This changed in this project: The interaction with the model; the arranging and re-arranging of sketches on the table; creating and tearing apart paintings on the panels; this whole process became a process of growth and self discovery. That is where the art was. These paintings are the record of that process.
Archival Materials
These paintings will not last. They’re made with newspaper which degrades quickly. This is important: our minds have a limited capacity to remember pain. Memory sands off the sharp edges, and eventually takes the colours and details with it. Eventually the memory of this episode will be nothing but an anecdote in my mind, and these paintings will have crumbled alongside.
Abstraction
There is a progression of abstraction in these pieces, which was not by design. I did not plan out how they’d work in sequence. They evolved in response to each other, and to my conversations. But I like how we go from the very real present, through to a very abstract undefined future, then wrap back with the final painting into something part way between. Abstraction/Realism becomes another mechanism of communication, that I don’t need to stay on one side of or the other. I can move along the gradient as I need to.
Self Critique
- The Things We Hold Onto is the strongest of the three. The composition is more open to interpretation and projection. When shown to my student group(without sharing the theme), they responded strongly to the painting calling it ‘evocative’, ‘haunting’ and ‘powerful’. One peer asked if the man had become a bottle — which is an interesting question given the theme of this painting is about holding onto the past. Bottling.
- Daily Affirmations feels the weakest, and is certainly the one I struggled with the most. I went through three or four full size iterations before finally coming to this version. I still struggle with it. I feel like the small test version (in the process posting, below) is stronger than the final image.
- Working in mixed media and acrylic has opened a different way of working that shows some fruitful experimentation. Again, this is most evident (I think) in The Things We Hold Onto. Here I’m starting to play with coming off the surface, and carving. Similarly, the transparent layering that opened up with the acrylic pouring in Binding Decisions adds a great deal of depth and allows the painting to work at a distance, but also to have surprises to discover up close.
- Working at larger size was a good choice. It allowed me to loosen up my process, and more fully realize my subject matter. That said, Daily Affirmations doesn’t seem to really deserve the space it has.
- A Place to Step Off From, A Place to Step Onto is compositionaly a bit strange. The bright belt of sky just below the middle separates its two main elements. I considered how to link them, but couldn’t figure out how to depict rain, or other weather, to tie these pieces. I’m still enormously proud of the work here.
Process Links
I’ve moved the process notes for each painting to their own respective pages, so as to minimize the clutter here.