There’s a point in almost every painting where I think I’ve fucked it.
Not dramatically. No throwing brushes. No tortured artist routine.
Just that quiet moment where you stand back and realise the thing you had twenty minutes ago was probably better than the thing currently staring back at you.
You went too far. Added the wrong colour. Covered the part everyone would have liked. Put a line through something beautiful.
Good.
Because I keep coming back to this idea:
It’s not art unless it has the potential to become a disaster.
I think about that a lot.
If I already know the painting will work, what exactly am I doing?
Executing? Decorating? Following instructions I've written for myself?
There is a difference between making something skilfully and discovering something.
Discovery requires the possibility of getting lost.
My best paintings rarely arrive without pushing back at me. They tend to go through periods of being awkward, ugly, overworked, underworked and occasionally fucking dreadful.
The temptation is always to rescue them. Return to the last safe place. Put the nice bit back.
But increasingly, I'm trying not to. I'm trying to stay in the painting long enough for the mistake to suggest something I hadn't considered.
The vessels in my recent work are a good example.
I didn't sit down and decide to paint vessels.
I certainly didn't decide to paint pools. Or containers.
Or flowers that don't really look like flowers.
They appeared because I kept following things I didn't completely understand.
And today I finished a painting called Tall Poppy.
The two forms in it became much taller than I intended.
My first thought was that I'd got the proportions wrong. Maybe I had.
But there they were.
Too tall. A little ridiculous and competing for space.
And suddenly the painting had a name.
That's the thing about disaster. Sometimes it isn't disaster at all.
Sometimes it's just the point where your original plan stops being in charge.
And perhaps that's where the interesting work begins.