Repeating Painting The Same Painting
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Repeating painting the same painting allows us to overcome the issue of content and concentrate instead on the thorny issue of aesthetics.
The jazz paintings have nothing to do with politics, globalism or London. Each one starts with a single colour, arbitrarily arrived at. After that, it’s about conscious relationships that seem about right. By “seem about right” I mean imagining a potentially interesting relationship, or maybe I don’t really know what’s going to happen next. In my procedure, not really knowing is okay, and sometimes it feels important to interrupt myself by doing something off-key to heighten the feeling of uncertainty about what might go next.
The colours are not created mechanically or from pre-determined palettes, but through a kind of contested intuition. This relates to the same local visual environment that everyone experiences. This environment is mediated socially and by free market economies. Through the process of painting, the work reacts to a transformation of the visible world that is constantly happening. They provide some kind of record of it, but hopefully not a slavish one.
It’s not that a painting is composed and then executed, like an artist who first imagines a gallery exhibition and then wishes it to be an institutional critique. The colours here are not all intended at once, as they might appear in a finished image. They emerge bit by bit, mixed-in together or separate layers with underlying edges. The tension in the final arrangement results from these accumulated, individually considered relationships.