Red car is one of a series of three big paintings, eight foot by eight foot (3.5m x 3.5m). It is painted on a blue gloss ground. The slick glossy blue is recessive/infinite, the painting is overlaid on this ground with big gestural marks in oil paint. The red car moves through an urban space - the “banlieu” – a non place. The occupant of the car is a small figure, carefully painted, just a glimpse of the head and shoulders fairly central to the painting. The only sign of humanity. She hovers, insulated by her big car in the midst of this utopian hell.
I wanted an image on the weblog, Red Car seemed appropriate. As an image and as paint it is both substantial and insubstantial. It is about an inconsequential moment, magnified. It expresses movement and stasis; lightness, moving through, transience - a passing moment caught, made weighty.
Painting is a verb, it is active, an event that takes place in time. Marks are gestures - a performance. It is the simultaneity of the act of making – the ‘moment of becoming’, that interests me. Red car reconciles and synthesises contradictory elements of gesture, space and image. The thinking/painting process is revealed.
I recall the making of this series of paintings as being an especially demanding physical job of work. Not simply because they are large, but because they are painted ‘wet on wet’, they required an attack, an awareness of surface and a sense of the breadth and physicality of the mark in relation to the totality of the work. In order to achieve the intensity of concentration needed to reconcile thinking and doing – to achieve a dynamic interaction of idea, image and paint I had to “lose” myself. This process of forgetting – familiar I am sure to all painters – intrigues me, and it has prompted this research project in which our intention is to discover what parallel may exist with processes and practices in other fields.
