So where is this going? Again I am writing here more as a diary entry than anything else. Something to keep tabs on what work I’m doing and how. Seeing if this falls into a pattern I’m happy with. The re-assessment of the work I’m doing needs to be a continual process, but now is more urgent than ever.
However, work done recently. And as is often the case work is driven by the need to produce work for the ur:project. So we can deal with that first. Unusually I wasn’t going to be working with Gabrielle, so my hark back to past works was beautifully timed with her need to be somewhere else. It was fairly quickly I dove into this idea, we had ‘Purple’ as a theme and I couldn’t resist the children’s paints. One of my favourite pieces has always been ‘Colour Metamorphosis‘, this and a love of Bruce Nauman ‘Art Make-Up‘ and I knew where to go straight away. I don’t want to pontificate about what the act of painting oneself brings to the work, the fact it’s children’s paint, the colours involved being red and blue etc. These always need to be for the viewer really. However that eternal fight between red and blue in the world taking place literally on top of yourself is something I can’t ignore, this is a fight many of us feel, also the fact that red and blue should of course become purple. But, we get that mushy colour you used to get in childhood when you mixed too many different paint colours. I wonder if I should have mixed the paint more vigorously with my hands, but I think I was still tied to part of my thought process where I’d have mixed only certain areas. That mixing of certain areas had given way to mixing, but choosing a place to stop where you might be able to just see where the original colours had been but then how they had transformed into this darker mush. So, yes happy with this piece, happy with how the performance felt, happy I filmed it and didn’t go for a performance on the night.
I’ve included here a ‘Red and Blue’ I found during my research. I really kind of like this, and it is probably where my half and half approach to the distribution of the paint came from. This battle between two perfectly similar halves that goes back and forth but nowhere really.
My ‘other’ piece was more a fun nod to someone else’s work that few would have probably even noticed. A northern, maybe even Mancunian, purple twist on ‘Monochrome Till Receipt‘ (White) by Ceal Floyer. It’d be great if I lived nearer to Islington Mill, to see how the receipt deteriorates, to see if it turns purple as so many receipts do when exposed to light for a long time. Perhaps I should re-buy the Vimto and film the receipts decay. Anyway, the name I had in mind for this was…’All The Wretch, Without The Vomit‘. I think that fitted nicely.
Whilst thinking Purple I’d searched my back cat of pics to see what purple I’d done in the past, no cigarette ads for Silk Cut I’m afraid, in fact nothing much purple. But I did come access a picture I wanted to rework.
Quite why I wanted to work on this again I don’t know, quite which one is right I don’t know, but maybe it can bring back some of my love for photography?! For now though I need to title it !
As for my death mask mentioned previously, well I’ll not list out my thinking on this but I need to make a test piece of plaster work for an idea of how to progress it. Hopefully i have the idea sorted now, all my thought process’ sorted into the finest detail. Just need my workmanship to be right for it, and that’s the difficult part!
Robert James Maclese 