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.