He, She, or They, Pintora Gallery, London, UK, 2015
Piece of writing from 2015:
Heads 68
Starting from a morning in mexico, I started the inordinately simple task of drawing faces. I become ravaged by greed as I covered paper after paper with charcoal lines. Finding the paper was not an easy task as I would scramble in the heat of the day round the paper shops of Oaxaca. This was a quick fast way to fully run out; drawing these heads. The night before I had performed ‘Monsanto and the milpa’ a performance visualising the horrors of gm in the face of an indigenous, eco and beautiful farming system in the area. My fellows thought the faces had metabolised from the faces watching witnessing the performance. I actually was drawn to the subject mainly as it took the piss. Subverting my hard worked on classical drawing training; disguising it in simplicity, disallowing it in cartoon, negating a way of drawing that had been shoved down my neck. A way to regain the power, a new level. A childish one. But one which children are highly skilled at. The Picasso cliché. But emotion was high on the agenda and gustons appropriation had paved the way.
I got back to home before Christmas with, as usual, some abstract painting planned. I started but abstract painting with such little structure was serious, draining on energy and toying with chaos, it wasn’t working, I wasn’t enjoying it. The human subject was quite a different way of handling paint and mind. It was human and there already, I was full of experience, the vividness of people in my dreams, the many faces on a planet of billions I walked past each day. I was also embarking into my first London studio after many months alone in the highlands painting landscape. People were landscape of this city. I took a look at the Mexican drawings and plunged in with paint. From a simple outline, these people became deep fascinations I made 20, 30 ,40….70, 80. Different styles different people. Colour while being the subtlety of local colour in the highlands always mixing and matching new ones from analysing what I was seeing now I was using it symbolically, still the language of the emotions as that is exactly how we are wired- primordial colour, more shades than names, but always evocative particular in their conjuring deep velvet green, the invincible lioness the golden yellow, and every shade of pink from flush to bloodless waxy skin.
The drawing is simple
The colour is complex
The drawing is the science unbendable structure
The colour is the art- human fills everything with history, memory, feeling.
Brown- sallow wind and acid colours like a knife edge
Blue the deep ocean much deeper when mixed with green sit with an expression taut
At one point I decided to represent mystics of all traditions, including the seminal mystical atheist, Richard dawkins. I painted a Picasso figure from a dark photo I had seen many years before. My brother with a lemon for a heart. Both sweet and acid. Colours become symbols, as if the person is expressing them. the parts of the body the same, ears for hearing, mouths for speech and desire, hearts for hidden feelings, deeper identity, beating and thumping. Different styles, less is more poignant, big paintings where the friend is one with the wood peace perfection. Much paint, more chaos, more about the fragile complexes hovering, blinking. References, childrens illustrations, other painters, the idiom of the byzantine icon, the old ancestors hanging in halls. I would not negotiate life but the imagination. On week 4 jessie buchanon came to save me from my demons, as existential questions started to poor out, what was I painting? I no longer could keep tabs on them- so many. She dared me to do an evil one, I hated it, its quite funny, it still remains-the evil scientist. She also saw a theatre of character. Protagonists, onlookers, prophets, maidens, also the gender questions came up, Jessie and others had different ideas about this seeing females where I saw male and often there was no gender at all just masculine and feminine aspects. they became a mirror for people as gendering was struggled with.. abandoned, hence the title of the show, I am very excited about queer politics, as it is a great relief for us all to stretch out and establish the grey area between the masculine and feminine that be. among us and break down the barriers between us in this way a huge step for mankind. Aliens another theme that crossed my threshold. For a moment I planned to just paint aliens, these dramatic impulses spurred and punctuated the highs and lows of this period of my work. The alien, the other, archetypes even, then I started to draw two people face to face. The complexity involved in painting two stalted any effort but the drawings remain, they are best when imagined lying in bed together perhaps in the morning. Tea pot man got tea pot wife. Hands were included. Spectres rose out of history -the warning, in the full apparel of drapery, maybe the Florentine renaissance, perhaps a roman. Englishmen became a theme, particularly the intriguing nerdy type, the book worm, the literary character. Baldness, no hair, almost all of them, as if hair is something that we hide behind. Like curtains. Or is it the delisciousness of drawing the egg head. Eyes are supposed to be half way down the head, but I have discovered the lower thy are the more gravitas as if the presence of the brain above them gives off a serious air, while if he eyes are higher as in most of these, the heart seems to rule the face from below the emotions and instincts sieze the day. ‘The warning’ is a head-y decision. The girl, the adolescent, the sour society girl, her displeasure write across her face. I was about to leave for Africa when all this came to an end, I was preparing to work with refugees from congo, by reading ‘dancing with monsters’ I made a last painting a Congolese militia man from my imagination. The imagination doesn’t make mistakes it makes something else.
