undertow

The following notes document the making of Undertow. Writing about a painting needs distance from it. The act of making tends toward its slippery conclusion carried by the materials, process, and the specific problems the picture presents.

Here is an account of that making. The painting itself remains elsewhere with its own expressive identity.

The title refers to a push and pull: from under, from above. Are we looking towards and beyond, or down into a depth? The coordinates dissolve into a relaxed ambivalence. Up or down, far or near; the rhythm remains the same.

The final surface structure presents itself as a series of glimpses at the possible paintings beneath.

Almost in frustration I covered the piece with yellow latex mixed with white spirit. As the latex broke down, dried and clustered, it fragmented and, for the most part, ran off. I could not unify this piece by final obliteration, closing the surface like a lid. Here I wanted a loose weave of varying gaps, so as to let the eye gently move through the structure of the painting.

From an ultramarine blue at the base towards billowing reds and oranges, to a phosphorescent green that forms part of the ground, all combine, I hope, for a suave reveal. The garbled spectrum, in this case, has perhaps broken from the striped purity of its usual confines. A rainbow is more often than not to be feared in a painting, much like the smile or laughter.

The yellow moves you vertically across the picture. Drawn into the image, the revealed layers dissipate and coagulate. Towards the final stratum the image becomes sharper, more elemental — like a residual crust. The yellow acting as a torn unifying layer, reveals with striptease ease the expanses below.

Undertow cannot help but flaunt it’s layered raison d’être. Some paintings are just like that.

But materials will prevail. The bare canvas, animated by the first action, set the problem. The painting now asks me, with insistent persistence, to solve what I started. The chemistry experiments may have exploded a couple of times but the residual images prevail.