Diebenkorn’s drawings have always had a way of getting under my skin.

His lone figures convey a sense of what is bold, sensual and agitated about the observed human being. And my response is to want to study them so I can experience something of their making, immerse myself in the physicality and absorption of marks applied and erased over and over. This often leads to stumbling over my aspirations; that sense of your hands clasping together seconds after the object you were attempting to catch moves through them.

And often the only answer is time. Days and weeks of lived experience sometimes need to intervene between you and your subject before a reimagining of it becomes possible. I was about to abandon my childish effort before I realise this figure could look out from behind that right limb of hers and still pay homage to Diebenkorn’s girl on the flowered sofa.

She would have looked right back at him. No flinch.

Painting the human subject.

The human subject as still life; as vessels for human hope, longing, failure and endurance.
The human subject as landscape; a terrain along which the eye travels and the heart and mind seek out encounters both strange and beautiful.

As history painting of the personal kind; creating a surface along which time is etched and a part of the artist's experience engages the beholder to form part of lived experience.

Let them announce the death of painting. The coffin will be empty.

Image: Head of the Girl - 03012014

They are all shifting; light, colour, mood, sensation. And for the best of reasons.

This drawing developed after studying a painting of Nolde's, Bathing Child 1922. It's a far cry from the beautiful naïveté conveyed in his work, but it just sank into me. His painting stirred inside me for a time and after some musing, my Head of the Child is what came out. 

It was over a year ago now I first caught site of Baldessin's figure in Performance, 1971. And the subject, originally horizontal, rotated itself to give her a largely vertical thrust outwards. I saw so much possibility in it - it was just a question of responding to that opportunity. Other forms repurposed themselves in my mind too, like Balthus beautiful and languid creature in Nude with Cat, 1948.

What came out the other side, after months of starting, then restarting this painting, was Indigo's Arc.

I settled on rotating mine 45 degrees to the left.

I think the parallels with religious iconography and motifs make the original image even more compelling. I love that modern art continues to serve up possibilities for re-interpretation and unravelling 75 years later.

At 5Walls.. The under drawing (barely visible now) was removed after an hour of persisting with it. Resisting temptations to describe forms, more intent on evoking and suggesting it. Switching between willow and compressed charcoals works well for me now.

Study of a Youth 2012

Drawing can embody the act, the willingness and conviction  one has to start over.

~ Ellen, you inspired this ...

"Concerning love, I had best be brief and say that when I read Bertrand Russell on this matter as an adolescent, and understood him to write with perfect gravity that a moment of such emotion was worth the whole of the rest of life, I devoutly hoped that this would be true in my own case.

And so it has proved... to that extent I can regard the death I otherwise resent as laughable and impotent."

~Christopher Hitchens Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays

Because I find her figure, slumped there like that, strange and beautiful. Her legs askew, sorrowful and silent like Morandi's bottles.

E

I visited Vienna Art & Designat the National Gallery of Victoria today, and kept returning to the Schiele drawings - they have a physicality, emotion and psychological tension that lingers.

Yet it's a physical reaction too, the drawings so intense and well executed they compel responses to the sensory data that may have inspired Schiele himself. Auerbach once said he wanted to capture through his drawings the haptic and tangible in human experience, "what you feel when you touch somebody next to you in the dark". Seeing Schiele's work feels like that.

Klimt's Portrait of Johanna Staude 1917 drew me back to it several times. The attitude, the gesture of it all from barely tamed hair to that nebulous pout (lips never finished in the hope, of course, that she would return to the studio).

A quote from Godfrey's Painting Today:

"the continuance of figurative painting and its ongoing validity are a key aspect of contemporary practice....figurative work that seeks to deal with the body as it is understood now: more vulnerable, less immutable, still the seat of identity but an identity that is understood as problematic, not something to be thoughtlessly celebrated."

Not something to be thoughtlessly celebrated.

Below, some shots of development work and studies....