'White Pears #25'
oil
on canvas/16″ x 20″/April 2016
One of the more ‘harder-won’ images of recent production,
this latest painting involved a fair degree of putting on and scraping back off
before it came to this point of resolution – but, of course, it is all about
the struggle, as I was sagely advised at university.
As introduced in the previous example, the image content of
this painting also utilises and further explores the compositional device of
placing two of the observed objects behind a screen of translucent paper in
order that they appear blurred whilst those placed before the screen are seen
in clear focus, visibly present rather than in something of a fugitive state,
in the manner of the arrangements of objects in Edmund de Waal‘s installation
‘A Thousand Years’ for example. It is very interesting to hear de Waal speak of
such matters during the course of his being featured on the compelling BBC TV
series ‘What Do Artists Do All Day?’, of looking at objects for such a long time
and/or with such intensity that they come to appear, or reappear to memory,
blurred, out of focus, and of how much more powerful they can seem as a
consequence, that not being able to get one’s hands or eyes on the object does
not necessarily lessen their presence or impact. Given the amount of time this
small group of objects, the whitewashed pears, has been composed in various
configurations, and observed, actively, with great concentration, to be
represented in paint, it perhaps seems appropriate that at least some of them
should have reached a state of shifting out of focus…
(detail)
(detail)
(detail)
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