Work In Progress: 'This S(c)eptic Isle': 'Flags' 3

Untitled:  Acrylics, Paper Collage, Ink, Spray Enamel & French Polish On Paper,
40 cm X 60 cm, 2017

Here's the latest of my paper-based flag'pieces.  It's been a few months since I last worked on these - having devoted much of the intervening period to sorting out the technically more demanding 'Fridges' (amongst other things). 

Working on something with slightly simpler technical issues in recent days, has provided a moment of comparative relaxation.   And actually, these flags, whilst possibly something of a blunt instrument - still feel pretty key within the overall 'This S(c)epic Isle' project.  That's obviously, in part, a reaction to this country's self-defeating Brexistential implosion - as well as to the creeping nationalism of global politics generally.  It definitely feels like the philosophical and ideological battle for the soul of the twenty-first century is really gaining momentum as we move deeper into its second decade.

But, less portentously, these images also hold currency for me because of the influence of this summer's major Jasper Johns retrospective at London's Royal Academy.  The use of the flag (of something supposedly already understood) will always be primarily associated with Johns.  His exquisitely dead-pan dealings with it are perhaps, above all, a formal/philosophical exercise.  However, their arrival, at a moment of escalating cold war and expanding American hegemony may also indicate a rather more engaged hinterland than is sometimes acknowledged.  

It's also worth noting that the Johns show also felt like another validation of my own tendency to work in series - or at least in closely-related clusters of pieces.  As it emphasised, Johns' oeuvre is littered with distinct, formally unified, sub-bodies of work, discrete print runs, and the processes of working through a particular idea via multiple iterations of the same motif.  Such conscious 'digging-in' and self-reference is, of course, a feature of many an artists' process - it's just that Johns has always felt like a particularly poised exponent of such an approach, to me.

Anyway, this makes eight flags, and I'm currently wondering whether to draw the line here or if there might be a couple more to come.  As with the others, this one is technically still  'work in progress'  It's certainly reached a certain level of visual resolution - but my internal debate over whether to add another layer of clearly legible text to them chunters on.  I also feel like they might get repurposed as a visual element within a proposed audio-visual presentation of my 'Below The Line / Beneath Contempt' text.

2017 has been a year of starting loads, but one which often felt a bit like walking through treacle.  Pleasingly, it's definitely finishing more fluently than it started.  Hopefully, next year will be one in which more of these creative questions are resolved - and a load more stuff actually gets completed, once and for all.  That's the plan, anyhow...