Completed Painting: 'Untitled 1 (Constructed City)'

'Untitled 1 (Constructed City)', Acrylic & Collaged Screen Print on Panel,
30 cm x 30 cm, 2020

Having taken encouragement from the paper-based studies I discussed in my previous post, I'm pleased to have now completed this modest little painting.  As I mentioned, a certain  lack of finished work feels like it's become too much of 'a thing' over recent months, so there's an undeniable satisfaction in having something new to unveil.  It should also be recognised as the first actual stand-alone product from my 'Constructed City' project.  Should I be concerned that the large buildings still being constructed around Leicester are progressing noticeably faster than my own responses to them (even in lock-down conditions)?

Well, enough with the overly-critical self analysis.  The painting does distill some of my thoughts about the construction work (if only visually, at this stage), and I'm still happy enough to live with it, after a few days.  Clearly, it deviates very little from the studies which precede it, and the decision to carry on working at their limited scale was deliberate.  That caution is also reflected in the fairly methodical and painstaking manner of its execution, in which respect it also resembles some of my 'From The New School' paintings.  The tight, grid-based geometry and crisp(-ish) masked edges do seem appropriate to the subject matter, however, and if a highly-controlled, confidence-building approach is to be my way into this body of work - then so be it.

Of course, the small amount of consolidated progress this piece represents, and the possible pointers it contains to work that may follow, should be what really matter.  If the welcome by-product is something that could also hang on a wall - then life is sweet enough for now.  

Completed 'Constructed City' Studies 1 & 2

'Untitled Study 1 (Constructed City)', Acrylic, Collaged Screen Print &
Fineliner Pen on Paper, 30 cm x 30 cm, 2020

Wherever you may be in the world, I'm sure there's no need to tell you - it's been a pretty strange couple of months.  We've all had to accustom ourselves to new and unpredictable forms of 'normal' - and will, no doubt, continue to do so for some time.  I'm fortunate enough to have been effectively getting paid to stay at home, so far.  However, constructive use of the locked-down hours has remained a concern, hovering perpetually at the back of my mind - even as normal sleeping/waking patterns have shifted, and normal temporal structures dissolved.

I'm not one of those driven souls who will claim to have been using the viral moment to 'live their best life'.  A degree of inertia has often been a frustrating keynote in my biography, and our current situation certainly hasn't altered that situation dramatically, in either direction.  Nevertheless, it's impossible for even me to ignore the massive dollop of creative opportunity contained within all these newly-liberated waking hours.  Admittedly, many have been spent attempting to devise potentially constructive ways to justify my wages, despite the fact that only so much of my normal work can be carried out remotely.  More have been spent on the gradually-elongating cycle rides that have provided both my main concession to physical activity, as well as much-needed visual and mental stimulation.  Those that remain have been spent trying to seize the creative/productive moment with my own work.

'Untitled Study 1 (Constructed City)' (Detail)

I've long bemoaned the lack of completed work to show for the last year-and-a-half's continuing activity.  Creative momentum has never abated, but it feels like I've struggled to punctuate a never-ending phase of work-in-progress for far too long.  The announcement of Lock-Down felt like an opportunity to address that once and for all.  Granted - it effectively put paid to my ongoing printing activities at Leicester Print Workshop, in pursuit of my 'Constructed City' project - but that in itself, had become another elongated cycle of  material generation without conclusions to show for it.  The decision was thus made to push towards some outcomes with what I already had - either by reconfiguring the existing printed imagery through collage, and/or by expanding the scope of the project to accommodate the kind of hybridised painting which has long been my default creative mode.

'Untitled Study 1 (Constructed City)' (Detail)

As an earlier post hinted, I rather hit the ground running at the start of all this - preparing a small group of shaped panels, and convincing myself I had adequate sketchbook imagery to seed the paintings I proposed to apply to them.  However, as is so often the case - over-confidence, and a misplaced fixation on final product at the expense of due process, sabotaged my best intentions.  Successful work only arrives after a proper period of gestation, and rarely through sheer force of will, and I really should know that by now.  Two weeks of concerted labour on the first of my new shaped panels resulted in little more than a series of false starts and dead ends, before the realisation dawned that it really wasn't what I wanted at all.  In recent times, I've normally been able to recycle the failed early states of any individual piece as it progressed - ultimately arriving at something more or less satisfactory through all that accumulated history.  This time it was different.  Effectively, I just ran into a brick wall this time, accompanied by the dispiriting sense of too many hours wasted.

'Untitled Study 2 (Constructed City)', Acrylic, Collaged Screen Print, Fineliner Pen
& Pencil on Paper, 30 cm X 30 cm, 2020

But (and here is the one important lesson I have successfully learned), it never really is wasted.  Abandoning or scrapping work provides no definitive proof you've lost your mojo - just a reminder not to rely on ill thought-out strategies or lazy comfort zones.  In my own case, it also emphasised the fallacy behind all my old fantasies about existentialist struggle and 'noble' persistence in the face of inevitable futility.  That approach may have looked good on Giacometti, but I know it to be a self-defeating trap for me.  The more sensible approach, I now find, is to avoid over-reaching for some illusion of final product, but without becoming bogged down in process purely for its own sake.  The key is to put down the brushes, question and re-examine the essentials of what exactly it is I think I'm about, then start over in a humbler, more considered manner, and with a lighter touch.

Which is a long-winded and somewhat pompous way of justifying the two little paper-based studies you see here.  They're not much, in a material sense - but fairly significant as possible pointers towards further progress.  They can stand as 'completed' pieces - I suppose, which is undeniably gratifying.  More importantly, they ask plenty of new(ish) questions, whilst answering just enough to encourage what may follow.  They certainly contain plenty of my old fixations with geometric abstraction and other quasi-Modernist formal affectations, but also attend to the multi-media and collaging techniques - and collision of multi-source imagery, that characterise my current concerns.

'Untitled Study 2 (Constructed City)' (Detail)

And their comparative modesty in physical scale may be their greatest strength.  It allowed me to work in a careful and considered manner - without feeling too profligate with the available hours, and to incorporate small sections of pre-existing printed content - without seeming to sacrifice too much of that precious material in a lost cause.  They feel like a necessary halfway house between the smaller collaged images in my sketchbook (which seeded them) - and the hopefully yet-more definitive pieces which may eventually follow.  Working at this scale - and with less self-imposed pressure to achieve in a grander manner, allows me the room to translate imagery in a manageable fashion.  They are, in other words, a useful and necessary step.  More ambitious pieces of greater scope will hopefully follow in their own sweet time, provided I resist the urge to run towards them with unnecessary haste.

'Untitled Study 2 (Constructed City)' (Detail)

On reflection, it may just be that I'm a bit ring-rusty, regarding two-dimensional imagery, after all those months of sculptural fettling.  For all that, you really would think I'd have learned some of these lessons by now - wouldn't you?  I guess it really is the case that you (I) have to just keep making mistakes, in order to find out how you might avoid making mistakes...             

Pretty, Vacant 4

All Images: Central Leicester, May 2020

Here are a few more images on the theme of vacant commercial property.  Once again, they were captured in the centre of Leicester (and separated by only a few metres), on another of my recent two-wheeled meanders through the city's relatively deserted, locked-down streets.

Being the erstwhile premises of a hairdresser and a bar, respectively - both are highly representative of the kind of enterprises forced to close during the pandemic.  Slightly ironically however, I know for a fact that both were empty some time before the current crisis.  What intrigues me in both of these cases, is the A4 missives giving notice of future intentions.  Clearly, the application for a bar license is more than a little irrelevant - for the time being, at least, whilst the move to an alternative salon nearby seems equally futile, even if the coiffeurs have "took over another business".  

So, while not actually documentary in nature, these images are still pretty symbolic of our current plight - I guess.  In particular, they seem to speak of an optimism that (with hindsight) feels more than a little misguided.  "When things get back to normal"  and, "When the pubs re-open" are phrases I hear pretty regularly these days, and it is true that the British  lock-down appears to have relaxed a little (officially), and frayed a little more (unofficially), in recent days.  However, it seems inevitable that the backwash from all this mayhem will cause more than a little turbulence, for years to come, both socially and  financially.  Something tells me 'normal' might no longer be quite what people expect.

  

I do need a haircut, though (and a social drink wouldn't hurt, either).

R.I.P. Little Richard

Little Richard: 1932 - 2020

My musical tastes have expanded in numerous directions, over the years.  But, like anyone of my vintage, the popular music I grew up with was pretty much all contextualised by the legacy of Rock & Roll.  When I first started to take serious notice, in the early to mid 1970s, we were still less than twenty years from that music's first flowering.  There was even a diluted revival of those early stylings occurring in the Pop charts (if only in the fashions worn on 'Top Of The Pops').  However, like any hybrid form, its recognisable components had been around somewhat longer.  The same might be said of one of its founding fathers, 'Little Richard' Penniman - who recently died, at the age of 87.

Little Richard was the most exotic of those pioneering Rock & Rollers (of whom, I guess - only Jerry Lee Lewis now remains).  And, for me, he was always the most striking.  I've plenty of time for the early work of both Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee, and will still cheerfully hang around for Elvis' 'Jailhouse Rock', or 'Hound Dog', should they crop up.  Nevertheless, Richard's stuff seems to contain a greater edge of genuine hysteria - carrying it just a little further than the others, to my mind.  And, ultimately - isn't that what Rock & Roll was always supposed to be about?  As a cultural form, its ludicrous extremes always seemed self-justifying.  Previous musics had  sought to liberate the Id, to loosen the hips and feet, or to prioritise the groin over the head - it's true.  But, it feels like this was about doing all that with an even  glossier, almost cartoonish abandon.  The artifice of it all seemed integral.  Even more than all the other sleazy predators, macho brooders and redneck hell-raisers - Little Richard really seemed to get that.

The difference, of course, stems from his sexuality.  As if expressing the oppressed Black perspective to White audiences in still-segregated America wasn't enough - here was a patently gay man doing it, with nothing more than heavy make-up, an exuberant pompadour, and a swishy suit, for protection.  Richard preferred to label himself 'Pan-sexual', it seems.  Certainly, he must have grown up in the knowledge  that to be both Gay and Black, in the 1940s, was to almost invite a lynching, amongst certain denizens of his native Georgia.  But no one can have been in any real doubt - can they?  Alienated from his family - he'd been fourteen-year-old drag act before Rock & Roll took off, and the lyrics of many of his songs suggested a degree of sexual ambiguity, at best.  Tutti Frutti', even began life as a celebration of anal sex, by all accounts.  When Richard whooped and hollered, and, above all - screamed, it was a voicing of the outrage felt by someone fighting society's prejudice on two fronts.  Like generations of Gay entertainers, before and after, he took the fear and anger, and transmuted them into exuberant performance art.  The lyrics may have been superficially upbeat, but the right to party is often code for the right to be accepted and heard also.

Famously, Little Richard's real moment was over, almost as soon as it began.  Having released all of his most memorable records between 1955 and late 1957 - he retreated into the Pentecostal Christianity to which he was originally raised.  Whether or not his ministry  was a sincere act of penitence for the life he'd lived - only he could say.  Either way, it would certainly suggest an understandable degree of psychological conflict.  When he returned to performance, in 1962 - it was largely as a Gospel singer.  He revisited secular Rock & Roll in 1964 - but who of us can really name a memorably rockin' Little Richard composition after '57 (apart from possibly, 'Bama Lama Bama Loo')?

His star would wax and wane over the following years - and incorporated the almost requisite substance-abuse and routine personal tragedy of the Rock & Roller, before he returned to active evangelism in 1977.  A year or two later, I was busily absorbing the implications of Bob Dylan's back catalogue - just around the time he too announced an alarming right-turn into Born-Again Christianity.  Disappointing though this may have been, it was also intriguing to learn that Dylan's own evangelising was often done on a double bill - with none other than Little Richard.  And the debt that American popular music (particularly Black music) pays to religion, must be acknowledged, of course.  His early songwriting was as knowing as all Hell, but the manner of its delivery was only a step away from what would have been commonplace in the church services of Richard's youth.

  

Ultimately, what really matters is that 'Long Tall Sally', 'Lucille' , and all those other early classic cuts still sound as fresh and urgent as they did a lifetime ago.  And, as others have pointed out: without Little Richard - would we have ever had James Brown and Jimi Hendrix, or McCartney's vocal stylings and Jagger's camp strut, or Elton John's piano-bound theatrics, or Bowie's androgynous shape-shifting and Prince's actual, and seemingly voracious, pan-sexuality - at least in the form in which we now recognise them?  And, with reference to the above - let's not forget that Bob Dylan's earliest-known, teenage recording, was a ham-fisted tribute to the man himself.

With the passing of Little Richard - it feels like a certain era might also have come to a close.  Certainly, the World will be a drabber place without him.



    
           

Pretty, Vacant 3

Central Leicester, May 2020

This vacant little beauty should have made it into my previous post, really - being both food-related and framed in red.  Still, better late than never - and it's definitely too attractive to ignore.  I wasn't even sure if these premises really were vacated.  Numerous take-away food outlets have continued to function throughout the Coronavirus lock-down, and that glowing fluorescent tube suggests some form of occupation.  However, closer inspection  of that barely-legible hand-written notice confirms this is yet another site for rent.

Once again - I don't know if all this is actually virus-related, of course.  However, perhaps subjective visual resonance and implied symbolism are more important than the actual facts, in matters of the art. 

Pretty, Vacant 2

All Images: Central Leicester, May 2020

Here are a few more images of vacant or inactive commercial premises, captured on another of my routine lock-down bike rides around Leicester.  Although these were encountered at two separate food-related locations - it's striking how they're unified by their red-painted framing elements, and delicious paper-based blanking strategies.

I'm not sure if it's exactly healthy that I'm starting to almost enjoy the slightly post-apocalyptic mood suffusing the city centre, in recent weeks.  In my defence, subjects like these windows were well represented in my photo archive, long before we'd ever heard of Covid-19.  It's not even certain that the inactive state of these premises is directly virus-related.  Years of economic uncertainty and Austerity have been stimulating such phenomena for years, after all.

Nevertheless, they do seem to capture the current atmosphere, I feel.  As I cycle around the eerie, almost deserted city streets, I can't help wondering if such economic inactivity, and the vacated spaces and blind windows that result, will become ever more prevalent  features of the urban landscape 'once this is all over'.