creative journeys

the point of going on a voyage of discovery is not to decide beforehand what it is you will discover, you have to be open to whatever you find. I believe there is an ancient Zen concept of not arriving at a spring with a full cup since you already have a filled vessel, you cannot take away anything from the spring.
Its in this spirit that I try to voyage and find ideas. There is no point in censoring yourself before you even find anything. There is no point in forming a mental construct of anything until you have found and studied it. As artists its our job to look and find and amplify. Is there any difference to finding a beautiful (yes, define beauty?) butterfly in a rain forest or a scary looking fish in the crushing black depths of the Marianas trench? You can never tell which creature may have a bigger impact or surprise.
I try to explain my work to myself and I try to follow some kind of logic, but there are times when solutions present themselves and there is no going back or rational explanation to be made. Isnt it equally irrational to paint a bunch of flowers slashed from their natural surroundings and jammed into a vase (purely for our own pleasure) and then painted? Why not then make a still life of 20 rashers of bacon draped over a door handle? It all comes down to what we regard as the norm. There is little rational about this.
Is there anything really rational about classical music? It must be the ultimate in abstraction, yet we regard it with the utmost reverence and awe. Why should visual art be anything less? (well okay , I do find Jeff Koons and Tracy Emin rather silly)

To me the camera is another way of telling a story. The old adage of: "The camera never lies" has somewhat faded with the arrival of Photoshop, yet there still is a tradition of looking through albums of photos as a kind of story telling. Even if it is a blurry image on a cellphone. This picture is part of my conversation about story telling. I think it will be the middle piece of a triptych, the one side being the fractured portrait in pigeon holes, the other being an image I am currently working on. It feels good. It doesn't make perfect sense, but there is some kind of kinship and connection among the images.
I am not discovering new worlds or continents, I am navigating the smaller fissures on and around them.

missive missile

if one had to visualise the emails and traffic of the internet as missiles, it would look like planetary intercontinental warfare, like a cloud of electrons blurring the nucleus of the globe. Its quite staggering to imagine. I thought of it this morning after the dog HAD to go out and I was waiting for some time and then my brain would NOT go back to sleep.
As an artist, visual stuff is so important. The whole notion of gathering visual fodder and looking at everything becomes such a focus of one's attention. I often forget that others around me don't share this ravenous gathering of images. Furthermore, many don't follow the way one often takes an idea for a walk and finds the strangest routes to explore... it happens. Without the very strange travels and diversions from the normal, it would all remain so predictable and ordinary. In order to find the new world one has to go forth and travel, to go boldly...
In my work I have been looking at how we communicate and how, when we do, we recycle stories and tales and connect them to one another according to the company and the situation. This means that ideas resurface in new and interesting ways. In just this way I am using digital images in my actual paintings by using a transfer film from Digital Art Studio Seminars, and also using photographs of my paintings in my digital work.
I am finding this very exciting and it allows the re-use of imagery and making interesting images.
In the included piece above, I have re-used part of the Sir Cornelis painting and incorporated into a digital work I was making. It extends the narrative I have been pursuing.
I am currently making a companion piece which should go next to it. Work in progress.

look through

working on the billboard style "mimesis", I kept feeling as though I wanted something more on the main picture...to suggest that there would be more hidden elsewhere. I painted an eye looking through a hole where the right eye would be.
Meanwhile I have been working on the preparation of other pieces and experimenting with some technical ideas, adding digital imagery by using a transfer film and getting some smaller pieces covered in silver point ground for drawings.
Nothing much to show there...only the new eye which I thought was worth looking at.

mimesis nemesis

mimesis, the old Greek concept of copying. The thought was that art was mimesis, it copied nature. Art could invent nothing. Its an old debate.
But in the stream of what I am working on, its a reference to the copying or almost miming of stories and history which one tells in social interactions. I "copy and paste" stories into a conversation from my memory.
When one is faced with explaining about yourself... telling about who you are and not just peripheral framework regarding yourself... one is faced with the rather large question about how you portray who you are. Do you under state in the belief that the cultural system of the audience is able to process understatement? Or do you inflate and colour the story for effect, knowing that the listeners will desaturate the story as with most media they come into contact with. (one hopes!)
The way one loads meaning into or onto the verbal picture you create is so easy to miscalculate and change the true nature of the point you are making.
In this image, a billboard style picture of myself,I present myself as a face one would find on a sideshow advert. Its the well worn sign board that is put out to attract the curious to come and see the freak show, the bearded lady, the tattooed man, the lizard creature. I have a single rhino horn growing from my forehead. Rhinos are pretty dangerous and lack good eyesight, they tend to rush in horn first, ready to gore any shadow, more bluff than lethal intent.
Its also a reference to the famous self portrait of Albrecht Durer in which he presents himself as a sophisticated gentleman, his long hair in carefully painted ringlets.
The halo.... so many people unconsciously want the artist to be fired into creativity by the Furor Divinus...divine madness... as though its a fragment of greatness or a touchstone of magical power. This is my worn and damaged and rather tacky halo which is worn on ceremonial occasions only. Hoarknockle dragged it out of the vault for this performance. Specially.
The whole surface of the image will be degraded and aged and faded to make it look old and worn. Rather a has been billboard.
The surprise will lie in the center of the work...which is in fact two narrow doors that hinge in the middle of the piece.
On the narrow faces of the two edges that meet when the hinges are closed, will be painstakingly painted insects against a dark background... once again a reference to the concept of Vanitas...the insects taken from 17th Century still lifes.
But thats still not there...for now its the billboard..getting older by the minute.. paint peeling and flaking off.

pittsburgh entry

a brief flurry of urgency in the studio as I rushed to get this ready for shipping to the Pittsburgh Society of Illustrators exhibition.
This is a work I originally created digitally to explore the concept of packing and unpacking as a metaphor for telling stories. The idea of blackbirds escaping from a baked pie is wonderful and has the magical and surprising quality I look for.
These birds are packed in boxes along with various other references to them and what they do.
I printed the piece on watercolour paper and pasted it to a thin sheet of plywood, sanding off the corners to emulate the way old photos are worn away, corners go missing and they develop all kinds of irregular shapes.
The frame is built to look like the top of an old box, now opened, showing some of the wooden slats that closed it and nails where the wood would have been broken away. Beneath the main picture are a few other old papers as though this would have been a box containing old memorabilia and now opened to reveal a picture of birds in boxes. The frame and wooden parts are made from old cedar fence boards al grey and broken down from years of being outdoors.
I took a brush to the digital print and added some darker areas and highlights and glazed it to add depth.
What I like and aim for is the contrast between the dry aged wood and the satiny glow from the picture inside it.
Like stories told, there are all kinds of unexpected revelations that emerge in the narrative. You find out things from places and people you often least expect it from. They have been packed away in boxes for years.

gun again

just a short posting.
Mostly finished the two pieces I have been working on and have been doing a lot of glazing and over glazing...slow going.
There are so many things that rob one of time to paint.
Its interesting to me that my grandfather, Johannes B Wessels, had to sign a paper promising allegiance to the British Crown after the cessation of Boer War hostilities. In becoming a Canadian citizen I too had to pledge allegiance to the British Crown. After all these years!
The rifle barrel is the front end of the rifle trigger...the more business-like end of the tool. I have often wondered at whom it may have been pointed and if it ever found its mark. Sobering thought.
These pictures have had numerous layers of over glazes to develop the depth of darkness and colour I was striving for. Its slow going but it certainly does achieve results.
The other pieces I am working on are all in such an early phase that it seems pointless to show a bare piece of wood.

empty space

rather like waking from a coma, and not quite knowing where you are in space and time. Having just arrived back from installing my youngest son in university, a week of preparation and driving and making sure he is okay.
I walk back into the studio and feel like I have suffered a brief spell of amnesia, the pictures look familiar but I feel I need to re-establish my connection with them, slightly awkward.
Hoarknockle (Why did I want to call him Horseradish?) is away visiting his sick auntie (I suspect there is a comely niece or cousin once divided, erm I mean removed, who may be hovering there). This means that I am currently living a life devoid of ethanolic joys as I cannot seem to find the wine cellar. Lets call it amnesia.
This has allowed me a giant stride in my work. I have taken up the brush again, a heroic moment. Now if only I can remember what one does with it.
My eldest son has returned from hunting tigers...or whatever it is the young men do nowadays. He is thin as a rake and has an extraordinary preoccupation with bicycles and Belgium. He intends to go peddling in Tobago... not quite sure what he'll be peddling. As long as he isnt trying to sell off the cars..... or my wine collection. Oh correction... pedaling.
Here are the most recent iterations of my work too.
The large painting featuring Sir Cornelis is almost done.I added parts of a rifle to it The red phone is coming along and is part of something more. The Cuca refers to a Portugese beer "Cuca" which was sold in Angola and after which illegal drinking places were named during the South African Angolan war. I found the bottle cap during a sojourn in Angola.