PAUL BUTLER: the space of forgetting

RED CAR

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.

Remembering and Forgetting

 An old  friend, artist, partner in crime, humourist (as so many artists are) Bev Brennan, said one day as we were walking through the Painting studios: “what students don’t understand is that you have to lose control in order to gain control “! Ah! one of those little casual insights that stays with you. In the same way, I suppose, as the unconscious is revealed through those little slips. We all say things which simply express complex ideas. At our lightest we can be most eloquent. Which is precisely the problem: Oh to lighten-up! To not care! – to forget!

Do practitioners forget, whilst theoreticians remember? Notwithstanding the debate about the nature of practice and category definitions such as “Theory” and “Practice”, one of the crucial issues in the debate about the relationship between theory and practice has to do with whether theory must necessarily bear directly on practice, or whether all that theoretical furniture can clutter up the mind causing one to bang into obstacles and trip over things. Theorising should not be confused with thinking. I do not think and then do (I can do both at the same time!) and theory does not necessarily precede practice. Writing does clarify thought but it does not displace practice - practice also clarifies thought. It may be that an internalized knowledge of theory informs thoughtful practice, but we should beware of an implicit hierarchy which makes text synonymous with theory, or places the word above the act - both require an intellectual engagement. Thinking and doing are not mutually exclusive.