Painting 13: Untitled (Deer Encounter 2)

Oil on canvas, 100x80cm, 2009

Yesterday I compared the experience of encountering a deer in the wild with the experience that can be felt from looking at a painting.  With this painting I am exploring how that sense of encounter is affected if the deer is observed from a voyeuristic point of view?  How does this affect the viewer's relationship to the painting?

The Auctions Are Open!

All of my auctions are now live on eBay!  Each of my 16 paintings has its own listing and you can find them all in my 'Penny Art Auction' shop here:

www.stores.ebay.co.uk/Penny-Art-Auction

Starting at 6.30pm, they were all timed to be 5 minutes apart from each other, which means they end on Sunday 15th April between 6.30pm and 7.45pm, with my exhibition then closing at 8pm.

If you have any questions about any of the paintings, please get in touch either by using the comments box below, my Facebook page, Tweeting me or via the eBay shop.

I had a strong sense of 'no going back' once the first painting was listed and this feeling was compounded when I viewed the whole shop and saw all of my paintings on there - all going for 1p!  It's really exciting not knowing what will happen and I've always been committed to staying true to my original feeling that I need to let them go.

Over the next week, I'll be continuing to upload images of the paintings that haven't featured in their own blogs yet, with commentary.  I'll also be introducing the band 'Do you feel what I feel deer' and filling you in on all the developments with the exhibition, which opens next  Thursday 12th from 6-9pm.

Painting 12: Untitled (Deer Encounter 1)

Oil on canvas, 100x80cm, 2009

The deer seemed to arrive in this painting of its own volition.  My work is primarily concerned with the viewer's encounter with the painting. Discovering a deer in the wild is comparable to this experience due to the heart-stopping sensation where you become aware of each other and time appears to freeze to allow you to be fully present and alive in the moment.

Painting 11: Untitled (Spring)

Oil on canvas, 100x80cm, 2009

As I have brought my exhibition forward to open next Thursday 12th April, I will be uploading my paintings more frequently to make sure you have seen them all by the opening night.

Yesterday's painting (10) was a figurative painting which occupies its own unique space within my practice.

This painting is the first time I allowed what was a purely abstract painting to give rise to a recognisable living being.  It happened completely organically and felt like there was a presence within the painting that needed to be given shape and form. 

Painting 10: I could have sworn I felt my spirit soar

Oil on canvas, 190x150cm, 2008

Here is a piece that I wrote about the background to this painting to accompany an exhibition:

In 1895, William Adolphe Bouguereau painted Le Ravissement De Psyche (this translates as The Abduction or the Raptures of Psyche).  Bouguereau, as a popular salon painter, was emphatically opposed to the emerging Impressionist movement because he interpreted their style as a rejection of the tradition of painting in terms of both technique and content.  This controversial stance put Bouguereau out of favour with his contemporaries and his oeuvre gradually became scorned as the 20^th Century reinvented the entire discourse of fine art. 

While broadly researching the idea of rejected art and what that is, I found a copy of this painting in a charity shop.  When I took it out of the frame it turned out to be a birthday card addressed to Lesley, printed by Athena in 1996.  So the image is now the kitsch material of greetings cards, but was so loved by Lesley that she framed it, then in turn rejected it and gave it to charity.  I was interested in the cyclical story of this painting coming in and out of what is allowed to be called art and what is relegated as being sentimental and displaced.

I wanted to paint this subject in 2008 and investigate the experience of looking at this painting, now out of its time, in the contemporary context where the beautiful is embarrassing and art has to have higher responsibilities.  Would a painting that had been rejected so many times over the last century be rejected again or would there be a way of giving it a contemporary value and engaging with both sides of the debate?

The myth surrounding Psyche and Eros, the two characters in this painting, also involves rejection and the difficult relationship with beauty.  Psyche (meaning soul) was considered to be the most beautiful mortal, so much so that she made the Gods feel threatened and inferior.  Aphrodite instructed her son, Eros to make Psyche fall in love with the most ugly mortal on Earth.  But when Eros saw her he fell in love with her himself.  So Aphrodite made Psyche undertake a series of challenges to become worthy of her beauty and her fate. 

I wanted to paint Psyche and Eros sensitively to try to convey the conviction of their feelings for each other but I wanted to make a clear distinction that this is a painting from 2008 and all the implications of what it means to make this sort of painting in the contemporary artistic climate.  By painting out the background in flat grey, I wanted them to look lost in our time.  I wanted to take the viewer on an uncomfortable journey between responding sensually to the story they tell and feeling repelled by the kitsch value of the rainbow and adornments that I added.

I hope this painting challenges our ideas of whether we still have use for beauty in art.  The aesthetic experience can be drawn upon to contribute to the cultural and critical discourse as well as being the source of ‘pleasure’, a word that today leaves an uncomfortable taste in the mouth.

The contemporary context for my aesthetics

Tomorrow I will post Painting 10: ‘I could have sworn I felt my spirit soar’.  This painting is very different to the paintings that I have shown you so far, so today I am sharing with you a piece that I wrote then to give a context to my creative direction at the time. I had been exploring where my paintings sat within contemporary artistic discourse, and this piece describes my intention to relate to that discourse while remaining true to my roots in aesthetics:

‘[There is] something of a pattern fought out over the supposed division between the apparent irresponsibilities of aesthetic pleasure and the social and political responsibility of ‘critical’ art, in which ‘beauty’ becomes the place-holder for conflicting interpretations of the political status of pleasure in contemporary culture.’[1]

In the late 1990s, with exhibitions such as ‘Sensation’ and ‘Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art’, the aesthetic value of art was somewhat rejected as people seized upon the more productive uses for art, e.g. socio-political influence.  Notions of the Beautiful and the Sublime, were perceived to be shallow in comparison with the potential for social witness and a reformative function.  The aesthetic experience is fuelled by a sensual encounter with the art work which has the power to deeply affect the viewer subjectively, with the capacity to provoke both elation and devastation.  But with the artist being more concerned with a statement of cultural, political or social influence, the experience is more functional, worthy or intellectual.  There might be a tagline or something to ‘get’, in other words the end product is the power of the art work as reflected by the intellect, rather than the work in itself.  The art object has been demystified and not without shame, de-romanticized.  

In this decade [2000-2010], there has been a renewed interest in the aesthetic experience, although the words aesthetic and beauty are still considered embarrassing.  ‘It’s now a common situation to find contemporary art inconclusively split, unwilling to fully endorse an aesthetics of pleasure, yet increasingly uncertain about art’s effective role in a politics of responsibility.’[2]  I would argue that aesthetics is about far more than pleasure and its critics would be surprised by the transformative power of the aesthetic experience.  In its truest sense, the aesthetic experience moves the subject (viewer) to a state that can’t be quantified by the imagination or the intellect.  Yet, by so paralyzing the usual cognitive faculties it can’t help but impact upon the way that viewer sees the world in that moment, be it politically, culturally, whatever.  The two sides already have the potential for unity and it doesn’t have to be a case of one or the other.  

‘At the centre of contemporary antinomies is that art must be and wants to be utopia, and the more utopia is blocked by the real functioning order, the more this is true; yet at the same time art may not be utopia in order not to betray it by providing semblance and consolation.’[3]

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[1]  JJ Charlesworth, Art and Beauty, published in Art Monthly no 269, September 2003.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory p32.

Painting 9: Light My Sky

Oil on canvas, 100x80cm, 2008


As I was painting this, it felt like everything I was doing was creating the possibility for something to exist within the painting.  Not so much a background, more the conditions for something to be held or contained by the painting.  It wasn't until I added the rainbow that the composition came together and seemed to give me resolution of a sort.  It was another move towards abstraction giving birth to form.