Drawing for painting

I’d been excited about painting again, but the painting wasn’t working. I’d forgotten how to look at people properly, and was struggling with working from a relatively unfamiliar sitter. That had been okay in the past, but now I feel like I need to know more about the head in front of me than I can get by just looking. I need to know how it feels, and how heavy it is, and how it moves, and how thick the skin is and—

So, I’ve been making these drawings of myself (they’re ordered chronologically):

Pounds

Pounds, on Bandcamp.

Pounds, on Soundcloud.

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.