Author: rjt
Girl with Red Fingernail
Painting again. This is from a photograph, of which I’ve made drawings from in the past. I’ve wanted to paint this ever since I saw it, and it’s been a nice warm-up before I start painting portraits again. There’s a little bit more to do, but mostly I’m satisfied.
Five faces
Building four, building six
It’s been a while since I’ve made any video, but the atmosphere of both these places struck me last night and compelled me to make some recordings.
Pounds
Erin and me have been constructing some songs, using bits taken from some droney keyboard/organ things we recorded in Buckley in January. I haven’t made music in this way before—both playing with another person, and using a computer to assemble a song from an overwhelming amount of pieces—and, though it’s been slow-going, has resulted in work I’m proud of. There should be a track or two more later, but mostly we’re done. I add the disclaimer that the tracks lose a bit (and in the case of Stationary a lot) in the process of getting onto Soundcloud. We will be making tapes of them later.
Previously I had made music with very little computering involved; either one-take improvisations, or a series of improvisations layered on top of each other, each played while listening to what had already been recorded as I played. We talked today about trying that method next time, with each of us taking turns to add a layer.
Francis Bacon’s floor
Wandering down a street in London I bumped into a gallery with a Rembrandt and Bacon exhibition on. Mostly there were Bacon paintings, but there was also a terrific Rembrandt, and these two images. They’d been found on the floor of Bacon’s studio, and carefully filed away. The poor photos don’t do them justice but I was captured by the strong connection they have with the way Bacon paints, and the way these banal, greyscale, reproductions were transformed by (I assume) neglect.
I had to do some sneaky photography to get these copies. I wish galleries would realise that they own the objects, not the images.
Drawing from Taryn Simon
This is a selection of drawings I made from a work by Taryn Simon: A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters. The photographs are terrific, and I think good enough to stand on their own apart from the text that accompanies them. Photography, in the context of a gallery rarely strikes me: a photograph’s objectness and life are what makes them interesting—a framed photo on a gallery wall is too often just another image.