Completed Painting: [dc]dérive 01

 

'[dc]Dérive 01', Acrylic, Paper Collage & Mixed Media on Panel,
300 mm x 300 mm, 2026

Sadly, the long, droughtful summer of 2026 proved to be pretty unproductive, creatively speaking - although certainly not for want of good intentions. I had planned to split my time/energy largely between screen printing at Leicester Print Workshop and writing the last ‘chapter’ for my long-delayed (but still active) ‘The Basin’ project. Any remaining hours could be used-up in producing more ‘Deleuzian Cartography’ paintings, with a number of panels already prepped and waiting. As it transpired, I only managed a few days of printing, with relatively little to show in the form of well-resolved outcomes. Meanwhile, whilst a brief trip to Bristol furnished a load of additional photos for the proposed chapter - only first drafts and research notes were made in terms of actual writing. Unfortunately, ‘events’ rather took over after that and much of the remaining summer recess was spent shuttling between home and a couple of Lincolnshire hospitals, due to familial health issues.  As is so often the case in such situations, the driving consumed at least as much time and energy as the actual visiting. As a result, the only fully completed product of the summer weeks is this little painting, entitled ‘[dc]Dérive 01’. 

There’s nothing massively ground-breaking about this one. It shares many of the now-familiar features of other ‘DC’ pieces, with its layers of composted map fragments, painterly gestures, delineated imagery and textual components. It is perhaps worth noting that there is here a degree of three dimensional illusion in the main motif - thus allying it with some of the earlier proto - 'DC’ panels [1.], rather more than the floating-plane aspects of later ones. Anyone familiar with historical dialogue between Modernist and Post-Modernist painting may appreciate that this might be a bigger deal than it initially seems (or at very least - it once would have been). I, for one, feel reluctant to commit either way, and so will attempt to still have my cake and eat it.

Thematically, the piece constitutes  a fairly superficial reference to my own long-standing enthusiasm for drifting around the city streets that form my everyday surroundings (on foot or on two wheels - and with camera readily to hand). Such wanderings are generally punctuated by regular stops for coffee and a few pages of whatever book I happen to have on the go, and, for what it’s worth, the dominant motif in this painting does derive from a particular beverage - purchased, documented and consumed in a specific coffee shop. Such caffein-fuelled flâneurism may seem aimless to some (that’s kind of the point, really), but it has long provided the arena within which my impressions and ideas are triggered, and the narratives and motifs within my work gradually coalesce. It’s fair to say that the countless cups of coffee, and the intervals (both temporal and spatial) between them, have become inextricably entwined within the overall process as equally vital components. Also, as my work has become increasingly influenced by a wide variety of literary sources, it seems only fitting that much of my reading should occur in the field, as it were.

None of the above is exactly novel, of course. I’ve written quite a bit on here, over the years, about the whole field of Psychogeography, its engaged wanderings through, and layered narratives, intuitive readings and subjective responses to, the urban environment. The idea of ‘the drift’ (as opposed to simply travelling with a defined purpose) was pioneered by such figures as Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, before being taken up by the Situationists and numerous later proponents. All of them applied some form of  pyschogeographic mindset to their Parisian wanderings. Such sensibilities might be productively applied to any metropolitan milieu, of course, but I guess there is still a certain romanticised dream of Paris as the archetypal drifter’s city. This is probably because Le Dérive, as a formal activity, was most clearly codified in the contemporary imagination by Guy Debord and his fellow Situationists. 

It was they who not only wandered the rues and boulevards, but habituated the bars and cafe’s of the Left Bank too. Like generations of philosophers, writers and artists before them, they used the humble café table to transform an entire quartier into an urban laboratory for radical thought/discourse. A couple of decades prior, Jean-Paul Sartre himself had transformed the famous Café de Flore into an effective HQ for himself and his Existentialist contemporaries - even going so far as to have his own private telephone line installed. Before them, of course, it had been Picasso, Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, the Surrealists and ‘all that lot’ who had occupied similar venues. If Debord, et al, would go on to espouse an even more explicitly political agenda than many (participating in the events of May 68, for instance), they were also nothing if not recreationally mischievous in their overall demeanour. For them, the city streets were envisioned as an arena not only for fermenting direct action, but also in which to devise absurdist art-games - just as children might imaginatively occupy their given environment.

In reference to all this then, amongst the cartographic references buried (fairly deep) within this painting, are streets in both Leicester and the Parisian Left Bank. I’ll admit that, often - while I’m gazing from the table of some local coffee outlet, part of my imagination isn’t also deludedly projecting itself into St. Germain, sometime during one of the cultural high-water marks of the twentieth century. So far - so pretentious, then. However, whilst this simple little painting clearly represents a degree of pseudo-intellectual self-indulgence, I’d like to think it celebrates small, harmless pleasures too.

[Composed using only H.I.]

[1.]: These were the so-called 'space_time' pieces, which I now realise form the baby steps for all the 'Deleuzian Cartography' work since produced.