What have I been doing lately? Well, I’ve been having my portrait painted. Swank, eh? I know, I know, I ought to have been immortalised in paint ages ago, the whole nation cries 🙂 Still, here we are. I’d been asked a couple of times before (not counting the sleazy offers of ‘you could be a model, do you want some pictures taken?’) and never felt like it but it just gelled this time. Sitting for an artist is a very interesting experience. I would say I’m quite a still person, trained by hours of church services and zero-tolerance science teachers (or sadists as they’re called these days….) so I was surprised to see how much I talk with my whole body. Never mind talking with one’s hands, my entire body is hypermobile. Who knew? The most (or least?) infinitesimal movement changed the light and thus the painting so my poor exasperated portraitist had her work cut out. I took some photos of the initial slash -and- daub painting. When the final portrait is done, I’ll post it so you can see her work. She’s very talented.
Seeing as I dabble as well, we talked art throughout. We had pretty similar tastes but where I think Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon are superlative artists, she hates them but for precisely the same reason which is funny. I like the works because they are true to the artists – they are totally misanthropic and are crystal-clear in intent. It’s not pretty, but it’ss very good work. She hates them precisely because they’re so talented and hate people so much. We both love Jackson Pollock.
It made me really think about how and why I paint. My works are very mannered, and she was encouraging me to just take to the canvas and see what happens as I don’t paint like that. I’ve always thought it was because it’s not my style but really thinking about it, I think most artists paint and get their inner turmoil on canvas/metal/whatever. I paint to express inner calm: it’s the order I want to put down, not the chaos. Essentially, I see pattern everywhere: I constantly add, divide, factorise numbers, make words from letters, see patterns in everything. No matter how chaotic the system – clouds, gales, waves, fluttering leaves – I always feel I can just see the pattern if I only looked hard enough but I can never see it.
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