Palette Cleanser

All Palette Images: Room A1.13, March 2017

As ever, one thing leads to another.  Furthermore, these days, it feels like I’m almost incapable of forming any kind of thought or gesture that doesn’t immediately seek to inflate into something more extensive.  Thus, what was intended to be a simple throwaway in my previous post - now turns into a whole suite of related images in this one.

I doubt there can be a single painter who hasn’t, at some point, casually fantasised about displaying their paint-mixing palettes, as if paintings in their own right.  Whatever form it takes, the palette automatically becomes an arena for all that gorgeous materiality in its purest, most automatic form - as yet free from the need to describe, evoke, or otherwise earn its keep.

The congealed residue generally displays a mode of unintentional painterliness that even the freest Abstract Expressionist could only dream of.  Its recognition as a possible image is, by its very nature, an after-the-event deal.  Naturally, the act of actively applying paint to a painting's substrate, however little deliberation one may affect, can never be as unconscious or uncoupled, as its manipulation, prior to the act.  The application is never fully divorced from some degree of intention, and even the cultivation of deliberately accidental methods is always different from a 'true' accident.  It relates, I suspect, to that scientific idea that the simple act of observing an experimental process, inevitably alters it.

There is clearly nothing very original about my cataloguing these encrusted palettes during the course of my routine day-job chores in the classroom.  And yet, I still couldn’t resist them; not least for their purely sensual appeal – but also because their status as Art Room accoutrements means their final appearance is even more the consequence of cumulative, communal, (and to be honest - sometimes, genuinely unheeding) activity.

In reality, by the time you read this, many may have been transformed by yet more layers of pigment mangling – making each of these photos true testament to a frozen moment within an on-going process; and one lacking a single author.  I can’t help wondering if part of my delight in separating each one from their glutinous stack beside the sink, wasn’t also because they form such an obvious antidote to my own extremely deliberate self-conscious approach to painting, just lately.

I thought about all this intention/unintention stuff again, a few days later, while talking to my friend, and fellow artist, Andrew Smith, on a day full of slightly strange art-related coincidences and apparent random correspondences.  These played-out through a series of Birmingham’s smaller galleries, but we ultimately found ourselves discussing a piece of Andrew’s own recent work.  At first glance, it appeared to be a pleasingly ephemeral abstract painting, apparently arrived at through largely accidental means.  

Andrew Smith. (Exact Details Unknown - Possibly Work In Progress), 2017

We mulled-over his quandary over whether to work into the image any further, and I reflected on my own inability to ever just let a minimal statement lie (as an habitual 'over-worker').  Then, Andrew revealed we were actually viewing the reverse of a previous ‘failed’ image.  The marks actually originated as traces of more deliberate statements simply bleeding through the lightly-primed canvas, and are thus – about as unintentional and after-the-event as they could be.  That simple piece of information completely alters the piece in my mind, transforming it from something of primarily sensory (and sensual) import - to something with at least as much potentially conceptual/philosophical (and distinctly Cageian) freight.

Like I said (and have repeatedly observed), one thing inevitably leads to another - and another...