Essay Excerpts
The Writhing of the Body

 

In this painting I started with a wide idea. But at the beginning focused on my hand only, with the intention that it would become a small part of a bigger whole. The process involved looking at my hand, photographing my hand, painting my hand, with my hand, imagining my hand touching and painting, imagining it being separate from me and lying there. Tying myself up in the painting.

 

While I painted the hand, I was kneeling over a cut piece of canvas loosely laid on the floor, my feet and body at times literally in contact with it. The hand I was drawing larger than life size. Somehow I had managed to mix flesh colours in a variety that was matched to my colour sensitivities, not a particularly systematic process, and the first time I had achieved this in oils. Invoking the subliminal meant feeling connected to the image, yet having a feeling of floating in between worlds, a hand disconnected from my body, yet coming out from my body, a transcendental experience, that was not happy or sad, but like floating out of time and the emotion of the ego.

 

As well as the idea for a painting, I had also had a desire to develop my sensitivity to using flesh colours in oil. Early on, I could tell that I had reached that point. I was calm and connected, I could see a multitude of colours in my flesh, aided by light from the south facing window, which offered soft shading and vivid tints. A perfect storm of essential elements, and being present meant I was able to recognise this, and importantly stop at the right moment, and forgive the idea for a wider painting. The meaning was in the fragmented piece, alone, and separated from the self, hence the title: I’m not here.

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"Ordinarily this would be a life-drawing that I would shove in a drawer and never think about again. However, through this self-exploratory process, given time and thought, meaning emerges through these frantic layers of different surface material, old life drawing, metallic spray paint, flecks settled on my keyboard as I write, rubbing out, layers excoriated by acid, drawing back in, melting together.  Layers of tortured messages begin to be revealed, and alignment with contingencies of the lifeworld can help to make sense of them: I can’t get it right (project and purpose in the world), I can’t settle (spatiality and space in the world), guilt at not being settled in the world, letting those around me down (sociality and how we relate to others), I can’t breathe (appropriation!)"