Completed Painting: 'Deleuzian Cartography 2'

'Deleuzian Cartography 2', Paper Collage & Mixed Media on Panel, 300 mm x 300 mm, 2024

Here is the second of my small ‘Deleuzian Cartography’ panels, a small clutch of which have recently emerged in the wake of my summer sketchbook experiments. As ever, the quantity/rate of production may feel a little less than desired, but the reality is that progress been consistent, and I think I’m reasonably content with the general direction they have taken so far. I think I should give up worrying about stuff like that once and for all, and just accept that I’ve always been a fairly slow, methodical worker, with many of the usual mundane limits on available time and energy in addition. Furthermore, each one of these often takes longer to resolve than could ever be predicted and - let’s face it, just churning-out a series of predictable ‘product’ shouldn’t really be the aim either.

In fact, the real ‘issue’ to be faced now is probably more to do with scale (i.e. the space side of the space/time interface). Any imagery deriving from maps must, by its very nature, imply a degree of open-endedness or extension. Ultimately, there is only one map after all (and it is spherical and without definitive boundaries). The end of one chart is just the beginning of the next. Even my own modest and localised voyages of discovery around the city reveal a seemingly limitless range of possibilities (what happens if I take this route instead of that? what happens around that slightly less familiar corner? How far can I really follow this river beyond the city’s nominal edge? etc.).

This would all suggest that one simple ambition should be to move away from what has become (often for simple practical reasons – or is it timidity?) my default ‘small’ panel size. I’m not necessarily talking Mark Bradford scale here, but the annexing of a little more territory is indicated, nonetheless. If limits on working/storage/living space all imply some conflict with that ambition, a sensible solution might be to consider the extension of imager over several conjoining sections. Thinking about it – that would be in keeping with the cartographical nature of this work too (see above).

Anyway, that’s all in a possible future. As far as this little panel goes, there is clearly some attempt to further dissolve the street plan into an abstracted soup of possible routes and directions generally. There’s also clear reference to the idea of the city being a vast circuit of energies and informational flows - as much as it is an arena for physical journeys. Overlaying (and threaded through) all this, more fluid traceries and Deleuzian rhizomes attempt to arc across, or take mental/emotional flight from, the territorial geometries of the map. That’s my excuse for a bit of Pollock-style drippage, and I’m sticking to it!