Woman Walking with Hand to Mouth

Four views of a work in progress.  This is four views of a single figure, about one metre tall, made from hardboard and fixed with a glue gun.  The figure is from Muybridge– ‘Woman walking with hand to her mouth’

Woman Walking Downstairs

The desire here is to get the kind of movement you find in Duchamp into the single figure, or to simply have the movement apparent in the static representation, so it’s very much a first version, and very much unfinished.

That may be a characteristic of my work on reflection, the ‘unfinished’ quality. I won’t claim it as deliberate, but then I do stop.

Duchamp - Nude Descending a Staircase

The process I try to follow when I work is to work without reference, to try to let the object dictate it’s own result.  There are some other examples here

Acknowledgements:

wikimedia commons Eadweard Muybridge

Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2 – wikipedia 21/04/12

Garden painting 2009-2012(unfinished)

A painting I’ve been working on since 2009, one of those that got away. There is a value in continuing in the face of failure perhaps, even if only for the freedom you get when you step aside and do something else. Without this painting, perhaps this one
would not have been done.  It’s very easy to get very frustrated with failures, and to batter something into submission, but the end result is usually horribly prosaic when it’s overworked.  Without wishing to get carried away with myself I find I think of the film ‘A Bigger Splash’ and the production of a painting after, and partly as a result of, the destruction of another. I don’t do the destruction thing myself, I’ve got plan chests full of old work, rolled up canvasses, and an incredible range of opportunities to look back in embarrassment.