I took these digital photographs at the Bristol School of Art. This kind of suface is the result of layers and layers of accidental painting and repainting. Contriving to produce such a surface rather defeats the point, and (like the difference between distrssed furniture and an antique) often looks daft. Of course, the act of framing a section of a rich, paint-spattered environment is a powerful one. Compositional beauty (perhaps all beauty) lies in the correct application of a grid, and I am no photographer. Often, the beauty my eye finds in these found paintings in the environment relies on a semi-conscious editing out. I cannot photograph what I see.
I have a passionate attraction to all things distressed, dirty, moldy, verdigris or patinated. Looking at lichen or the cracks in leather can occupy me for hours. I think it has something to do with the scale-invariance; aerial photographs and microscopy have much in common. Staring into rockpools, I lose my sense of scale. For a feverish moment, my sense of myself expands and contracts at the same time.
I seem to loom, ballooning, yet simultaneously, vertiginiously, to dwindle down to a mote. I call this sense 'the giantiny'. Along with this scale trick, the kind of surfaces in which I find most pleasure have that quality of Leonardo's Wall (which many men have spat upon). Yet even this rich hallucinatory material does not fully explain the almost culinary attraction I have to this kind of thing. They are a feast for my eye (I have but one). On seeing such a surface in life or art, I almost need to lick my lips. Reach out and grasp with my hands. Open my mouth. I cannot fully describe the sensation, the hunger I have for the speckled surface amazes me.
I have a troubling 'Truth to Materials' Leech-style superego, which takes an offence (comic in its intesity) to material made to look like something it isn't, but in a half-arsed way. A copy of a copy. Why, for example, do cigarettes have mottled orange filters? The filters were once made of cork. Accident lazily becomes tradition. The reason such a thing as the colour of cigarette butts makes me so angry is, I hope, bcause it is emblematic of a wider trand in culture. The future becomes a thoughtless shallow copy of the mask of the past.
I took these digital photographs at the Bristol School of Art. This kind of suface is the result of layers and layers of accidental painting and repainting. Contriving to produce such a surface rather defeats the point, and (like the difference between distrssed furniture and an antique) often looks daft. Of course, the act of framing a section of a rich, paint-spattered environment is a powerful one. Compositional beauty (perhaps all beauty) lies in the correct application of a grid, and I am no photographer. Often, the beauty my eye finds in these found paintings in the environment relies on a semi-conscious editing out. I cannot photograph what I see.
I have a passionate attraction to all things distressed, dirty, moldy, verdigris or patinated. Looking at lichen or the cracks in leather can occupy me for hours. I think it has something to do with the scale-invariance; aerial photographs and microscopy have much in common. Staring into rockpools, I lose my sense of scale. For a feverish moment, my sense of myself expands and contracts at the same time.
I seem to loom, ballooning, yet simultaneously, vertiginiously, to dwindle down to a mote. I call this sense 'the giantiny'. Along with this scale trick, the kind of surfaces in which I find most pleasure have that quality of Leonardo's Wall (which many men have spat upon). Yet even this rich hallucinatory material does not fully explain the almost culinary attraction I have to this kind of thing. They are a feast for my eye (I have but one). On seeing such a surface in life or art, I almost need to lick my lips. Reach out and grasp with my hands. Open my mouth. I cannot fully describe the sensation, the hunger I have for the speckled surface amazes me.
I have a troubling 'Truth to Materials' Leech-style superego, which takes an offence (comic in its intesity) to material made to look like something it isn't, but in a half-arsed way. A copy of a copy. Why, for example, do cigarettes have mottled orange filters? The filters were once made of cork. Accident lazily becomes tradition. The reason such a thing as the colour of cigarette butts makes me so angry is, I hope, bcause it is emblematic of a wider trand in culture. The future becomes a thoughtless shallow copy of the mask of the past.
1 comment:
All true!
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