Up until this post I have not posted anything that is not my own work – but since I am being more open I’m going to break that particular rule.
First a little preamble. In 2005 I was attending a life drawing class in the Lewisham Arthouse run by an amazing painter called Stephen Palmer (apologies this is the only link I could find for him – his more abstract painting aren’t present – and they are worth searching out). Steve had a beautiful book of Russian icon paintings (one I picked up 17 years later in Cambridge Oxfam).
The Icons bothered me – I couldn’t qualify their impact but it was persistent. The gorgeous colours, the design, the stylising and the sense they give of powerful forms in decay. Even as the images have presence, a fulsome earnestness and mystical bravura; they are clearly also in dissolution – the forms are merging or damaged. Time is breaking them down. & every time I felt I was reaching completion – when I had taken a drawing as far as I thought I could – the qualities of those icons would nibble at me and my sense of what it meant to construct an image.
I would rub out and restructure accordingly. And the paper itself would start to break down.
I found by obscuring the space that made up volume I could stylish bodies. To some degree or other the is a strong influence from medieval structures.
Later I would read about the Japanese aesthetics of Wabi-Sabi and I would see a commonality.
I can see no such thing as perspective.
In Cambridge (I think 2020) I became aware – through friends – of the old and very dead tradition of British church wall painting. The only ones to survive had been white washed over and have been slowly revealed over the last 200 years. Henry viii and then Cromwell had scourged the churches.
I like the image of the itinerant church painter going from church to church with their book of templates. I wonder if they were as holy as the church would’ve wanted of them. Churches filled with patterns, and demons, and saints, and doom, and parables.
Like icons they had the very creative use of space that existed where rules of perspective had yet reach and before photography transformed the images people understood.
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