What is Process-Driven Painting?
Lots of people want to understand my paintings. They kind of like them but they want some kind of lead in to what they should be feeling, thinking and experiencing when they look at them. I have a kind of vague response which goes something like ‘whatever you are feeling, that is the right response’. Not helpful! So this is an attempt to introduce you to where I am coming from. In subsequent blogs, I will go deeper into the philosophy behind what I do, which believe me is INCREDIBLE! But also, not for everyone. Thank you for reading this far, and remember – if you just want to look at my paintings wordlessly, that is perfect too.
I describe my paintings as process-driven, but what does that mean? Essentially, I am saying that there is no preconception of what they will become. I don’t begin with ‘something to say’ or an image to work from or a specific form of inspiration. I don’t even have a fixed emotion to discharge or express. My painting practice ultimately, is about none of these things. It has taken me a long time to understand this and to be ok with it because working in this way makes it very hard to answer questions (and there is a lot of pressure on artists to justify themselves). It’s also not something that I was taught and so I have had to root around in the dark, and amongst my paints, to find a language that can adequately carry my process.
“The painting has a life of its own. I try to let it come through.”
If I am just painting for the experience of painting, what is it that is so compelling to me? The simplest way I had for conceptualising what I do, was to say ‘I paint light in search of truth.’ I think I need to unpack that a bit because what is light in this context and what is truth? I know I said I’d save the deep philosophy for later but I need to get into it a bit here. By light, I am describing the experience of coming up to the surface of the ocean and breaking through the cold, murky mass to feel the rush of breath and the sun on my face. Painting gives me that. By truth, I mean the sense that the windows have been thrown open in my mind and I can finally see! Indeed, I had a whole exhibition entitled ‘I Want to See’ in 2017 (link here).
We’ve all had that experience of encounter with some form of art, right? It could be live music, in the theatre, even in nature. I’m just going to talk about it in the context of painting here for simplicity’s sake but substitute whichever art form most speaks to you, if you like. It is a feeling of transcendence. It could feel like relief, it could feel like recognition, it could feel like a deep resounding ‘yes’. These are all reactions to art and that was my way in to becoming a painter. When I first saw Rothko paintings in Paris in 1997, I had that reaction that was at once tearful, elated and more than anything, made me come to life as if for the first time. I was hooked.
“I shut my eyes in order to see.”
All through my Fine Art degree, I tried to paint into that experience. I knew that paint on canvas was an access point but I didn’t know how to paint the painting that would be conducive to that reaction – I didn’t know what that painting looked like. Of course! It can look like so many things. So it wasn’t the subject of the painting that was essential or even interesting to me. Quite early on, I discarded representational painting in favour of abstraction because anything else felt too head-based. Like an equation: I am interested in this, so I am painting about it to communicate this specific thing about it that you as the viewer can understand and process rationally. I was guided down that route quite forcefully but I resisted, because although there is a place for that, it is not me.
I began a process of stripping away as many elements as I could to get down to the actual structure of the thing. Three primary colours plus white. The paint is the agent here. I needed to get out of its way. Gone was self-conscious mark-making in favour of the incidental motion of the paint. Gone was labouring over balancing a composition, or making a painting pleasing to the eye. At least, I’d love to say I discarded those things so effortlessly, but being human, it is an ongoing tussle between my ego and my muse to move nearer to my desired outcome. I felt like I was getting closer to my artistic identity but I wanted to satisfy my need to know what this experience, this encounter was from the outside.
“When you start a painting, it is somewhat outside you. At the conclusion, you seem to move inside the painting.”
In 2002, a year after graduating from my painting degree, I started my MA to research what this agent was that was present in art and produced such a sensational effect in the viewer. I learned about the Kantian Sublime and used him and other philosophers to help me answer the question ‘is the aesthetic experience revelatory of an exclusive modality of truth?’ It led me down various rabbit holes of what can be said to constitute truth and whether this thing, this aesthetic experience, was something that could be isolated as a reaction to art alone. I wanted it to be, because I felt it to be almost holy and art was my favourite source of transcendence! But I will save my specific conclusions for another blog post.
Ultimately, I found that the answers to my questions were going to be found along the painting journey. That is to say, by becoming more intimate with my artistic process and probably not by reading about theory in a book. Although, if I am honest, I am still avidly chasing answers in books. Just as the experience of the encounter with Rothko was a sense of aliveness that transcended time and identity with form, it slowly dawned on me that the way to access that place had to also be in a moment of pure aliveness without attachment to time or identification with form. Hence, for me, it is in the process of painting – being driven by the alchemical properties of the paint in motion – that art is born. Paradoxically, I depend on having no ultimate vision of what the painting will look like. I try to banish the impulse to relate identifiable feelings or images through my paintings. They rest on my reverence for art, which strengthens me as a gatekeeper of that experience, until the paintings reveal to me what they intend to be and in fact, already are.
