Completed Painting: 'Untitled (From The New School) 13'

All Images: 'Untitled (From The New School) 13', Acrylics & Sprayed Glitter Paint On MDF,
30cm X 30 cm X 10.6 cm, 2020

After starting the year with a somewhat self-indulgent look back (over four decades of popular music, no less), it's time to redress the balance with something new.  This recently completed piece is the latest in my occasional (but definitely still on-going) series of 'From The New School' paintings.  It feels far too long since I had anything actually finished to show, although there's plenty of work in progress - with my 'Constructed City' and 'This S(c)eptic Isle' projects still occupying most of my thoughts.  Pleasingly, I'm working with a little more energy and consistency again, these days - but it's simultaneously the case that gestation periods seem to have extended within both those enterprises.

In that context, producing these little panels provides a useful punctuation within the overall continuum.  I tell myself that just delivering 'product' really shouldn't matter, and yet... They're kind of therapeutic, too - with each providing a compact and self-conscious opportunity to adopt a different aesthetic or mode of painting within a standard format.  You can read far more about the rationale behind the series here.  Suffice it to say, it feels highly appropriate that I've been able to paint every one of them on the premises, at lunchtimes and after hours, around my employment as a School Technician.

In this case, I reverted back to the crisp formality (and a pretty similar palette) of the very first two.  The challenge here was to make an unashamedly shiny version, using various metallic paints.  It came about after repeatedly bemoaning the tendency amongst certain of our GCSE Art students to 'improve' their exam work with an unexpected application of glitter (or even sequins) - regardless of how inappropriate to the image that may seem.  I decided to join them, rather than trying to beat them - and to find out what happens if you commit whole-heartedly to something you might otherwise dismiss as slightly kitsch.  After all, Chris Ofili, Fiona Rae, and centuries-worth of religious artists all tried the shiny stuff - and it hardly held them back.

I won't pretend the painting's shimmer doesn't cheer me immensely - so perhaps the kids really are onto something.  All joking aside - it's all too easy to see any piece of work through one's own Western, and possibly Modernist, Art glasses.  No single culture or tradition has the  monopoly on aesthetics or taste, after all - does it?

More importantly still, it also gave me an excuse to buy the aerosol can of glitter paint I'd been secretly hankering after in B&Q, for so long.