Harry Kent: Blue in Green

Blue in Green, charcoal and acrylic on paper, 140x115 cm

Little Boy Blue,

Come blow your horn,

The sheep's in the meadow,

The cow's in the corn;

Where is that boy

Who looks after the sheep?

Under the haystack

Fast asleep.

Will you wake him?

Oh no, not I,

For if I do

He will surely cry.

                             (Trad nursery rhyme circa 1744)

I noticed at my last Painters Group Critique session at the University how may images shrank down to banality as they were hung in the long corridor. If my work is to retain some force then i must learn to paint on a more monumental scale. At the same time, i'm trying to move away from realism.

This painting was done from a mirror, just a small hand-held affair which meant i had to paint one-handed. I was hoping to produce something wild and free and abstract. Instead i got the plodding image you see. So now ive also started doodling self-portraits from memory. No photos. No mirror. No-one to hold my hand. That will be my next large self-portrait.

Meanwhile, i'm still thinking about the Fukushims series. And new media, innovative use of materials.

And ive started work on a large landscape.

So, the inertia that has held me in its grip over recent months seems to be lifting. I have a lot of catching up to do. It's a race against time. People younger than me are dropping dead from heart disease.

It's always a race against time.

Howl with Alan Ginsberg

Howl, a self-portrait in charcoal and oil on board, 56 x 74 cm

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked ... 
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars!
Children screaming under the stairways!
Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo!
Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories
dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels!

from Howl, by Alan Ginsberg


listen to Alan Ginsberg read this section (Part II) of Howl on Youtube here

Howl and Other Poems (City Lights Pocket Poets Series)


This self-portrait is a refinement of the technique i developed and described here.

Still on the theme of aging, this self-portrait is a generational piece. It does not carry the same intimately personal charge as the self-portrait Regrets. Instead it concerns itself with the social visions and convictions of a generation.

This was the 'beat' generation of the 1950's. It was the generation before mine but their lifestyle and voices were to sound loud and clear through the 1960's and on into the '70s. The Ginsberg poem voices all the excesses, optimism, despair, restlessness and fervor of youth. It contains the protest voice of youth which was to reach a crescendo in the 1960's.

Youth and old age actually have a surprising amount in common. Both are not deeply immersed in careers and therefore deeply attached to the socio-political and economic order of the day. Both are relatively free to raise a critical voice which those raising families and paying mortgages are not as mentally free to do.

I believe the elderly, because they have seen so much, have a particularly important social role to play as reviewers and commentators.

Once again, the young and the old are called to be the prophets of our age.

This self-portrait aims to express a howl of pain at the state of global industrial civilisation, and a prophetic howl by once again invoking Ginsberg's rage against the corporate machinery, the urban madhouse, the planetary plunder that has marked this generation and has marred this generation.

For Blake's dark satanic mills are still pumping the fetid effluvia of a long dead geological age off the coast of Florida to give an angry fix to a world hooked on octane, pelicans drowning in our black decay while we ineffectually jog off our obesity in trendy trainers from the sweat-shops of Asia.

And thanks, Elizabeth Anderson, for your comment below which put me in mind of Peter Finch's stirring prophetic outburst of outrage in the movie Network.

"I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!'

You can watch Peter Finch's stunning performance on Youtube here.

but the last voice here today belongs to Alan Ginsberg, so if you want another taste, read on:

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments!
invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries!
blind capitals! demonic industries!
spectral nations! invincible mad houses!
granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven!
Pavements, trees, radios, tons!
lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!

Regrets

Regrets, oil on board, 90 x 60 cm

There is no flock, however watched and tended,
But one dead lamb is there!
There is no fireside, howsoe'er defended,
But has one vacant chair!

The air is full of farewells to the dying,
And mournings for the dead;
The heart of Rachel, for her children crying,
Will not be comforted!

from Resignation , Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
 
 
It's not for laws I've broken
That bitter tears I've wept,
But solemn vows I've spoken
And promises unkept;
It's not for sins committed
My heart is full of rue,
but gentle acts omitted,
Kind deeds I did not do.

from Regrets, Robert William Service

Back to the serious business of expressive self-portraits.
 
With each one i focus on an emotion as i work, especially emotions i believe common in the adult world. More common with advancing age, yet seldom depicted in self-portraiture or even spoken of in the slick dream that has become our public media.
 
Today, yes, regrets i've got a few. Robert Frost had miles to go before he slept and still had promises to keep when he wrote his evocative little poem.
 
The elderly have very few miles left to go, and carry the burden of promises not kept.

Facing Autumn

Facing Autumn, oil on board, 51 x 60 cm

Oh it’s a long, long while
from May ‘till December
And the days grow short
When you reach September.

When the Autumn weather
turns the leaves to flame
One hasn’t got time
For the waiting game.
For the days dwindle down
To a precious few...
September...November...

from September Song composed Kurt Weill, lyrics Maxwell Anderson.


The acrid scents of autumn,
Reminiscent of slinking beasts, make me fear
Everything, tear-trembling stars of autumn
And the snore of the night in my ear.

For suddenly, flush-fallen,
All my life, in a rush
Of shedding away, has left me
Naked, exposed on the bush.

from Dolor of Autumn, D. H. Lawrence

i will arise and go now

I Will Arise And Go Now, oil on canvas, 60 x 60 cm

It is time to explain myself—Let us stand up.
What is known I strip away;
I launch all men and women forward with me into THE UNKNOWN.
I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.
I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

from Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
in Song of Myself: And Other Poems by Walt Whitman by Walt Whitman

                          ~O~

I know that evenin’s empire has returned into sand
Vanished from my hand
Left me blindly here to stand but still not sleeping
My weariness amazes me, I’m branded on my feet

My senses have been stripped, my hands can’t feel to grip
My toes too numb to step
Wait only for my boot heels to be wanderin’
I’m ready to go anywhere, I’m ready for to fade

In the jingle jangle morning I’ll come followin’ you

from Bob Dylan's  Mr Tambourine Man

                         ~O~


I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
from Yeats,   The Lake Isle Of Innisfree


                        ~O~

What is there in my name for you?
It will die away like the sad sound
Of a wave splashing on a far shore,
A noise in a deep wood at night

But in the day of sorrow, in silence,
Pronounce it longingly.
Say: There is a memory of me;
In the world there is a heart where I live.

from Pushkin in Poets of Modern Russia (Cambridge Studies in Russian Literature (p.9)


more intimations  of mortality
but low-key compared the previous emotive images with their expressive mark-making

unfortunately the photograph doesn't really capture the the three-dimensional relief of the heavy sculpted impasto of the coat and jeans

The bright yellow shoes, among other things, reference Whitman's boot-soles that will wander over our mortal remains, composting, carbon-captured in the municipal lawns.

But also Mr Tambourine Man's boot-heels as they dance Shiva's dance of creation and destruction ... the figure borrowing something from classic Indian sculpture of Shiva inside his aureole of flames, lifting his leg, extending his arm.

In the jingle jangle morning we all follow Death in the Danse Macabre, Danza Macabra, Dança da Morte, Totentanz.

i wanted some ambiguity between figure and ground.  i wanted the forms to beg the question about
what stays and what goes,
what is permanent and what is ephemeral,
what is substantial and what is fragile
what is solid and what is hollow,
what is lively and what is dead,
what is real and what is illusion.

rage against the dying of the light

Rage Against the Dying of the Light, oil on board, 76 x 60 cm

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rage at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

from Dylan Thomas,  Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night (free copy) 

in Selected Poems 1934-1952, New Revised Edition

or you can listen as Rodney Dangerfield recites Dylan Thomas on YouTube


This is another painting examining the emotions of associated with aging, with entering the winter of life's seasons. Earlier I had looked at horror of dying, and briefly looked at stoic resilience in the face of loss of physical and mental functions. This time i wished to examine rage, what Elizabeth Kubler-Ross saw as a stage of anger in the grieving process. And i believe aging and approaching the end of life to be a kind of pre-grieving, for oneself, and for loved ones that are left behind, bereft.

and so i read afresh Dylan Thomas' wonderful poem, and its words repeated in my head as i savaged the paint from the tubes and grasped the nearest hogs hairs with which to stab at the surface.

i was intending to produce a sequel to my Pulvis et Umbra painting from a couple of weeks back. Thinking i would be doing an overwash of zinc white (it is more transparent than titanium white) as before, with the resulting loss of detail, i did not bother with a charcoal drawing nor with underpainting, as i had with a number of other works in this blog.

instead, direct application of paint to a bare black gesso surface. Black, to signify the absence of light, the infinite black, eternal darkness . "Turn out the light and then turn out the light".  So i reserved a large blank black area to the right to explore how a black space can somehow talk to the figure in a painting (to me, they seem to resonnate off each other, the black almost a figure in its own right).

Fast work, quickly developing an image, not getting bogged down in exact perspectives or precise naturalistic representation. Rather, aiming for just the basic feel of the thing, welcoming distortion as part of the expressive load in the image.

But as i was about to wash over the top in white, my eye caught the quality of the brush marks, and i recalled that my project is an exploration into expressive mark-making in portraiture. And so i left it, rough, raw, urgent.

my belief is that the manner of the brush marks betray, or rather leaks, the emotions of the painter at the time of painting them. The Italian Renaissance had a saying 'Ogni pittore dipinge se" - Every painter paints himself. The characteristic way one makes marks, rather as in handwriting, is specific to the individual and reveals something of the habitual disposition of the painter.  What others recognize as his or her style.

my desire always is for fresh marks of spontaneous energy and power. Maybe this painting will be a step in my journey towards that objective. That is really for others to judge.

so here it is. Rage Against The Dying of the Light, a self-portrait, of striving towards the light, of raging against the engulfing blackness all around, of the blackness seemingly speaking back in dialogue with the figure.

[To accompany this painting, i have posted some photographs celebrating Light and Lamps in my photo blog, the crystal cornea. See column on the right for a blog link.]

defiance

          Defiance, oil on canvas, 46 x 46 cm

Update:  OK, here is the coloured version, just finished (1.00pm Sunday 23rd), sporting my yellow painting jacket. I've now popped the exploratory sketch that was here down at the end of this post. Thank you everybody for the wonderful comments you have left. They are what makes this blog so rich and rewarding for me.

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well, i just got back from a few days in melbourne (have posted some pics in my photo blog the crystal cornea) and dying to get back out into the studio to continue work on my latest. The very day i left i was working on this preliminary sketch in charcoal and acrylic.

the theme continues to be the emotions around aging, around growing old, about the loss of physical and mental powers, the loss of social status, the increasing incidence of serious illness, the ever increasing likelihood of death.

Although these are self-portraits, this work is not actually about me. As i explained at the very start of this blog, i am using self-portraiture chiefly because the model is always available, will do whatever i ask of him, and won't complain about how bad i make him look.

Yes i draw on my own emotions to fuel the energy of my brush, but this work is not 'confessional'. I am not simply indulging myself in some solipsistic fugue. Rather, i am trying to make more universalistic statements. This Masters project is as much sociological commentary as it is psychological exploration - or will increasingly become so over the coming year.

I am trying to articulate states of feeling that many people know but can't own up to because society maintains a conspiracy of silence about them. We shunt the old and terminally ill into institutions - out of sight, out of mind - while we young ones get on with making and spending money as if getting and spending could never come to end, or could ever be an end in itself.

i had been exploring feelings of horror and terror at the realization of mortality, not simply the intellectual acknowledgement of one's own mortality, but the feeling deep in one's bones, one's gut, that one, me, you, will cease to be. I am now trying to move on from that to other feelings. And the one i am working on now is stoic defiance. Keep away disease. Keep away death. The finger in the dyke. Except i'm too old to trust in failing dykes.

a detail of brushwork from Defiance

the initial sketch for Defiance in charcoal and acrylic

looking to the future

            Looking to the Future, oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm

this is the latest, wet off the presses ... still needs some tweaking but will need to wait till tomorrow when some of the medium has evaporated and the surface is more 'leathery'. Timing is everything, i sometimes think.

the theme remains 'the emotions of aging' but moving on from the horrific realization of one's mortality to the slightly more positive and complex 'coping mechanisms'.

the real problem i have is that i don't know where to go with this painting. It is not the style i set out to use, not the marks i intended to make. I got impatient with the underpainting etc and in my exasperation fell back on fast alla prima. I'm just comfortable in the chaos when too many things are happening and they're all happening simultaneously. I get so many gifts from the paint in the panic - not to mention the adrenaline rush.

OK, next one i promise to be methodical and disciplined and to eat up my veggies. (meanwhile, i'll just keep surreptitiously replacing this image with fresh ones till i'm satisfied i can do no more. Fortunately there is a severe limit as to much i can fiddle with this kind of painting before it starts looking tortured to death).

the bits that have some satisfying bits (for me):-

when your intside's out and the outside's in

                    When your inside's out and the outside's in, oil on board (a door), 56 x 76 cm

UPDATE (11-8-10):
I have just been informed that this work has been selected as a finalist in the acquisitive Birchalls Tertiary Art Prize .

The prize is worth $2,500 and although a chief critereon is innovation, i suspect they chose to shortlist my work to hang something a bit unconventional and 'in your face'. But because the winner will hang in the gallery's permanent collection, i expect that in the end they will award the prize to a more conventional canvas. I'll find out 2 September.

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But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

from:  As I Walked Out One Evening, W. H. Auden;

Have been revisiting the work of the Canadian expressionist, Phil Iverson. I'm excited by his bold use of colour and impasto brush work in portraiture. And his use of found timber for painting surfaces. I enjoy the strength and drama of his work.

And so to this experiment. i haven't fully worked it out yet, but this painting is about portals and about insides and about Time. It is painted on a spare varnished wooden door to signify Doorways into this life and out of this life. And the trauma of passing through some of those doors. Some doors we can't wait to open. To turn 21, to be able to drive a car or buy a drink or take a bank loan. To step through the door of graduation or maybe of marriage.

But other doors we hope will not to have to open. The door of a prison, or the door to the operating theatre, or the oncology unit... or the door to the crematorium. Doors of pain. Doors of shame. Doors of doom.

this painting is also a response to Time. Our clocks are all ticking. We are each born with a fatal wound. We are each haemorrhaging time as our lives ebb away. As Bob Dylan sang in  It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding),

“... he not busy being born
Is busy dying”.

and the painting is also about insides. Insides out. Outsides looking in. Subjective-Objective. Self-revelation. Self-portraiture as a kind of public self-immolation. Blood speaking to blood in a language more ancient than words. It passes over the boundaries of national borders and across the divide of centuries more effectively than a Google translator.

i became interested in old images of anatomy and autopsy as a metaphor of our concealed inner selves, a way of depicting what lies within, hidden from the world and even from ourselves.

for this work, I've also been interested in exploring Brett Whiteley's breaking of the surface plane (on what is otherwise a fairly conventionally painted surface, say in Alchemy. And so to bring these interests together i've  created a three dimensional 'wound', a fissure through which internal anatomy becomes external, through which Time ebbs. It is built from builder's putty extruded through fly-wire, with dangling plastic tubing to suggest arteries.

 Maybe i’ll rework the found timber some weeks from now.

paint over it more? though i did want the weathered timber to read as the tell-tale hand of Time

cut it into narrower sections (adjust compositional elements)?
though i did want the figure hemmed in and claustrophobic inside Time.

attack it with a blunt weapon (the violence of Time)?  ...  Igor, hand me my Berzerker axe.

self-portrait with green skin

Self-portrait with green skin, oil on paper, 40 x 48 cm

A second experiment with watercolour technique but in oil painting. Liberal quantities of turps are sprayed into the paint in an attempt to create marks the reference crepey skin. I was seeing if I get an elephant skin look and control the process enough to suggest form. Attempted to develop highlights by 'floating' them in as opposed to painting them in.

The work is still very representational. It is a long way from art informel - its form is way too tight. I will make a third attempt at suggesting an aging face, but trying more for the horror of one's body aging, of being caught in that inexorable living dissolution, heading towards the final dissolution.

The next experiment will utilise more of a tachisme technique, heavier paint and even more turps moving under their own power within a formal composition. Loosening up and abstraction will begin in earnest Semester Two when i will use this current crop of portraits as the 'models' for further paintings, breaking up their image, leaving mirrors and photos behind for a while.

painting aging skin

Self-portrait with crepey skin, oil on paper, 38 x 38 cm

The search for intimations of weathered, thinning skin and hair – intimations of mortality – continues. Previously I had tried the paint-knife with paint direct from the tube, mixed with bentonite clay granules to attempt a 'crinkle-skin texture'. It looked like cat vomit. Fair enough since it the bentonite was sourced from Kitty Litter.

This time round, mark-making utilising very thin paint. Thin paint = thin skin?

Borrowing from water-colour technique, I created turps-diluted washes of Prussian blue, strategically spraying in additional turps to create flow of pigment where I wanted it, rotating the primed craft paper support to produce the resulting drain/grain direction.

I wanted a crepe skin, a creased and cracking skin, beyond Oil of Olay. The pics show how it turned out.

ho hum, interesting, sort of (*shrug*) ... but a long way short of the horror of this mortal coil as it uncoils.

I have a gut feeling maybe blood and guts are called for, skin parted, flesh ruptured, internal organs made external.

Could that be a credible metaphor for the internal state of the artist (me) mediated to the external world (you, gentle reader) through the proto-language of his mark-making?

Back to the lab, Igor.

Sylvia Plath, Satre, and trouble with mirrors

Mirror
Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

“There is a white hole in the wall, a mirror. It is a trap. I know I am going to let myself be caught in it. I have. The grey things appears in the mirror. I go over and look at it, I can no longer get away. It is the reflection of my face.” Jean-Paul Satre, 1938.

Well, Jean-Paul, I'm left wondering if the advent of the common mirror, readily available, easily affordable, infesting all our domestic corners and public spaces, was a necessary pre-condition for the birth of existentialist philosophies.
Or the birth of Western individualism.
More to the point, was the bathroom mirror a necessary pre-requisite for the self-portraiture of Angst ?
A pre-requisite not because an already angst-ridden artist could now sketch from his crystal mirror image, but because the birth of the industrial-manufactured mirror became a determining factor in the very birth of the modern pervading sense of Angst. The material culture's artefact 'mirror' so conditioned the cultural milieu that society could now comprehend, connect with, and value the cultural artefact 'portrait', expressive of the state of Angst.
Enter the two Freuds.