Completed Painting: 'Untitled 13 (Constructed City)'

 

'Untitled 13 (Constructed City)', Acrylics, Paper Collage, Adhesive Tape, French Polish,
Aerosol Paint & Ballpoint Pen on Panel, 600 mm x 600 mm, 2021

I'm not generally in the habit of obliterating finished paintings.  That's certainly not to claim everything is deemed 100% successful (far from it).  However, I'll normally take a piece through as many iterations as seem necessary to resolve it - often setting something aside for a while pending subsequent revisions, or completely abandoning those pieces that just won't work out.  But occasionally, something gets 'released' in a state I subsequently decide I just can't live with.  So it has proved to be with 'Untitled 6 (Constructed City)' - a painting that hung on my wall (somewhat reproachfully) for around three months, but is now effectively deleted.  I wanted to believe I was satisfied with it, but ultimately had to recognise it just wouldn't do.  Actually, I suspect the desire to call something 'finished' simply overtook my better judgement over something that didn't really work.

'Untitled 5 (Constructed City)': No Longer Extant

As a result, I recently decided to revise the painting.  However, my tinkering still failed to deliver the resolution I was seeking.  Instead, a completely new painting on the same panel became the only viable course of action - the result being 'Untitled13' (Constructed City)'.  I'll admit I toyed with the idea of titling this one '6.1' , but as there really is nothing of the original image left, the idea of a new 'remix' doesn't really apply.  Instead, this new image is so obviously the sibling of '11' and '12', that it seems preferable to capitalise on the sense of forward motion, and to simply let '6'  slide as a gap in the sequence.  Which is the least healthy impulse, I wonder - a neurotic desire to tie-up every loose end, or this constant need to show my working?

Of course (current technology being what it is), our footprints are no longer fully erased.  Having once entered the public arena (however obscurely), '6' can continue to haunt this body of work as a digital memory - and to possibly provoke the occasional self indulgent meditation on the tension between the virtual and the 'real'.  I won't pretend I don't enjoy these attempts to apply a kind of digitally-informed sensibility to something as archaic and material as the tradition of painting.