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...