Slow Painting A-Coming...

‘Samuel Beckett’ oil on canvas/40″ x 30″ (in progress)

Currently, I’m attempting something in paint that I’ve not done previously, in transposing a photograph – and an iconic one, at that – in oils on a large scale, in response to what we shall term a domestic commission. The challenge, to begin, has proved itself to be exactly how one might go about such an endeavour, with a few false starts thrown in, before things have started to make some sort of visual sense and progress is being made, albeit in stately fashion.

The starting point, the subject, is of course a print (A3 and squared-up to be drawn on to the canvas) of Jane Bown’s famous and rather wonderful portrait of Samuel Beckett, taken in 1976 when Beckett would have been seventy years of age, delightfully craggily expressive of features. The good thing about such an enlarging is that it allows a freedom with the application of the paint, to make of a mechanical photographic print something hand-made and painterly – whether the result in any way does justice to the original and subject will be another matter.

In an act of what might be termed ‘method painting’, I’m currently reading Beckett’s novel ‘Molloy’ and will soon be taking up ‘Malone Dies’ in order to in some way ‘inhabit’ the author/subject and the world he creates – that this experience is a pleasurable one only enhances to the experience, the creative process.