Sunday, November 10, 2013

Sirens of the Sea

1 comment:

Jeremy said...

Sirens of the Sea (Klimt’s Fish blood sketch brought to life)

At first one is simultaneously struck by the overall lushness of the picture of women caught in a whirlpool, as well as the incredible detail. There is a to-and-fro process, as ones tries to unpick the shapes of the semi-dissolved women from the finely detailed background. It is easy to get lost in the detail, visually examining the seemingly irrelevant random collage paperwork. But slowly it emerges that there is no repetition of patterns, and a fascinating systematic and disciplined interplay of details across the entire painting. All areas have pieces from other areas, though each band and body has its own unique character.

There is also a dialogue with the past. Klimt’s work is reimagined and celebrated. This happily admits there is nothing original in art and kicks off with the picture as merely a series of shapes upon which to collage; Is it a commentary on the superficial “style-society” which overwhelms us all? Or merely pleasant shapes and colours, like Christmas wrapping paper? The women are passive victims of a type of whirlpool on the one hand, yet bursting with a suppressed erotic energy on the other, almost bursting free of the canvas. The shapes writhe with powerful visually-rich, life-energy feeling-detail. The bodies are simultaneously peacefully floating and dissolving in space/time/water, and solidly stylised.

I wanted to make the bodies see-through and dissolving into the background, which I achieved. I also wanted the patterns on the bodies to be a cross between stockings, body-art and tattoos. It is a number of infinitely painstaking abstract mini-artworks, comprising the whole. So the viewer never gets bored.

There is a lovely unexpectedness and playfulness of the patterns which they keep changing in any given area. There are no text words used in this work. Some chocolate box details are used which seemed appropriate. The orange hair, made of chocolate wrappers, butler’s pizza-flyers and so on, was a challenge initially, but I was very pleased with the end result.

With this work I had my big breakthrough, discovering the interactive dialogue with the materials as they fell in unexpected places (even back to front) achieving a better result than I could have done by careful planning. This excited me tremendously and gave me the feeling that someone else was guiding the work. It is of course an interaction with the subconscious, but because I do not understand this, it makes it attractive and interesting to me. There is also a subtle eroticism in the painting, and a hovering between dreaming, swimming, floating etc. The final thing I did was collage in the faces which I had initially left blank. Its whole attractiveness is that it swirls and hovers between so many things, creating a level of ambiguity as well as a “reaching for the divine” in the picture.