City of Glass 23 - (Stare) 120x100cms City of Glass 22 - (The Fall) 120x100cms
WED 18 JUNE 2014
Red/green apple...the Big Apple...the Garden of Eden...'The Cholmondeley Ladies'....
This is a strange piece...I have been looking again at the paintings in isolation and have concluded that while working as a pair, they both work individually...they were made that way. I only put the paintings together when a photographer friend, Dennis Morgan, took the photo below for a competition and then I began to see them as a pair with a 'cleave' within each and also between them which adds an exciting additional dimension. As a pair, the power of the face is diminished, both because of its' smaller proportion within the whole but also because of the power of the divide between the two paintings.
The painting(s) have divided opinion and provoked thought, in particular 'Stare'. I had a fantastic discussion about the piece with students and staff from Canterbury Christchurch University when they visited the studio., exchanging ideas and possibilities for the piece. There have been other comments on whether the face works at all, whether it belongs, whether it is too strong, too graphic, too out of kilter with the rest of the series. Also how disturbing the face and the stare are. This is intentional: this is the face of Stillman who locked up his two year old son in a dark room for nine years in a deranged experiment to discover the language of God.
So, to conclude, I think I can and shall, show the paintings individually or as a pair. This duality is delicious: after all, in the novel, in his thesis*, Stillman discusses the dual meaning of 'cleave, to both break apart and to put together.
* P:43, 'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster
City of Glass 23 - (Stare) 120x100cms
WED 4 JUNE
In the twenty-third painting in the 'City of Glass' series, the face of Stillman finally emerges. Below is an earlier version which I wasn't happy with - it felt like a cartoon, a drawing rather than a painting and was in front of the divide. I like the new Beckman-esque Stillman, trapped behind the 'cleaved' shape of Manhattan, like the bars of a cage. He stares into the dark room where he has locked up his son for nine years , he is menacing, obsessed...dense reds and greens add to the feeling of claustrophobia. I have enjoyed juggling wth the figurative and the abstract languages and have brought unity and coherence to the piece by linking the angles and triangles of Manhattan with the angles in the face, shirt collars and coat. The last act was the introduction of the one circle/button of the overcoat, which in it's perfection, softens the power of the face.
City of Glass 22 - (the Fall) 120x100cms
SEPTEMBER 2014
Even though the image of the figure was removed, there is a human presence, the marks left by my own hand, the dragged fingers in the paint on the top left.
The idea of duality, of 'cleave', of good and evil resonates. When I showed the painting to an artist friend, she was initially seduced by the richness and denseness of the colour. But when I explained the context, Stillman's experiment, locking up his son Peter in the dark for nine years, she was repulsed by the painting: she saw the fingermarks as belonging to Peter, clawing at the walls of his prison.
WED 31 MAY
This piece continues the exploration of the power of the divide and also references Stillman's musings about 'the fall', where quoting Milton: 'It was out of the rind of one apple tasted that good and evil leapt forth into the world, like two twins cleaving together'
'Stillman also dwelled on the paradox of the word 'cleave', which means both to join together and to break apart'*
The idea was to split/cleave Manhattan in two, one side New York today with street-grid and piers and Central Park and the other side how Manhattan would have looked at the time of the Garden of Eden, a natural, empty landscape...
However, to establish the shape on the natural, 'before the fall', green right side, i used a grid and enjoyed those plotting marks...then I found/made an immense red which established the direction of the painting. In the early stages, Stillman's face stared at the viewer between the two sides, but then colour took over.
