The basic stylistic attribute of the untitled series, an emphasis upon the wood grain of the panels, has become an irritant.
I've thought of the two dimensional base as unmalleable, it is down deep; it is canvas or panel or paper or whatever. I have also thought about Picasso and Braque and their depiction of wood grain in synthetic cubism.
In old oil sketches the artists often left portions of the base showing through as a middle tone and separation between colour applications. Many early modern oil painters prepared the base with colour before painting a representation upon it.
I could carve into the wood with chisels, knives, and a router but then it would be a painted low relief sculpture and sculpture is less illusionary (occupying real space) and less malleable than a painting which alludes to space. Two dimensional space is impossible. It is the greatest magic trick of all.
I want to define what is the unmalleable base of a painting with paint, through tinted acrylic clearcoats. I don't want to leave it raw to become soiled and rotten. Previously, in LandSea, I would occasionally allow the commercially gessoed weave of the canvas to show through clear gloss polymer isolation coats under removeable matt varnishes. I am giving the viewer a glance down, through acrylic to the bottom layer of concrete surface.
There it is, I say, the ground; a dead piece of machined wood.
Is it a symbolic or concrete base? Where is the base of a painting? Is it lodged in the cultures of all humanity? Is it located in cave painting and the ancient surface art which has weathered away? Is it in the canvas stretching factory workshop in China? Is it in the cotton fields of the Southern United States or is it in the lumbered land.
That is the source of my irritation. The wood grain is basic but not the basis of the painting.
Wood grain in a panel painting is aesthetic, representational, fact and fiction. It doesn't translate into written language. It is an atribute of lumbered wood. |
