Painting is dumb

Music and literature have always had more influence on the things that I want to paint and draw than visual work.

Painters, printmakers, creators of tactile work make me want to draw, to make lines and marks, to revel in the manipulation of surfaces and to grapple with the how and the what of image making. But it is the poetry of verbal storytelling that gives me hunger for the why. Sometimes it is hard to find a clear narrative voice in your own images, the non verbal expression gives wonderful leeway for the visual artist to play with concepts without the restraints and preconceptions of language but it also makes it hard to formulate a coherent sence of narrative within the non-linear storytelling devise of the single image.

Sometimes I find my mouth and my mind full of stanzas that I don’t have the literary subtlety to articulate so I cough the half formed stories into my hands and atempt to plaster the same stories across a sheet of paper in lines that don’t loop and curl with laungauge but form coutours around ideas and flow around them as visual forms on the page.

Ulimatly though the image always falls short of the idea. Bugger.

Been a while

Haven’t written anything on here for a while; mostly been posting on the Life Drawing Blog of late. Ive been quite busy preparing for the next Drawing Circus, the Big Draw and White Night in October but I thought Id sit down and root through the drawings of the last few months. Here are a few life drawings, Rosie very patiently sat for them.

Fig. 1 Rosie at Rinaldo’s

I spent a while last month chopping up bodies (with a pencil not a cleaver), trying to find beauty in the abstract lines and blocks of tone that shape a figure, taking away the connotations of identity that portraits confer. Still not quite there, but a lovely thing to explore, despite unnerving results. A photo set of some of the pics coming in a bit.

Fig 2. Rosie at the studio

I’m hiding a lot of the best pieces from this month as they’ll be going to a show at the Norman Rae Gallery in York at the end of the year for Grim Tales, my first solo exhibtion for a little while. Here’s a bit of a drawing for one (More on it later). Sleep soundly.

Jake

Fig 3. Frankie

Painting

Ive been getting a little painting done in the fair weather and the foul. Here some oil sketches of Emma and Caro.

Fig 1. Emma

Fig 2. Caroline

All made up

This weekend I’ve got work at the Made Up popup shop in London, it is at Arthur and Albert Studio, 50 Acton Mews, London E8. 10am-6pm today and 11am-4pm tomorrow.