Sunday, April 10, 2016

White Pears #25


'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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