It’s confession time, although I don’t think this will come as much of a surprise: I like process. I like the rituals set by a particular method and the freedom to make up my own rules. But I wonder to what extent I then fall back on process as a way of making. In the past I have unpicked and re-sewn large patches of canvas, as in Das Ziel shown on my website. In these works, once I had decided on the concept, and made initial choices about size and material, there were few opportunities to respond in the actual act of destruction and (re)creation, a repetitive process. I don’t think that process is a bad thing in the act of creation but it came to dominate my work, becoming the subject matter.

Process is, I think, related to the concept of Flow proposed by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi. I first came across it as part of my day job, but have since read about flow in relation to craftspeople and artists - who achieve a sense of total absorption once they are skilled in their craft and engaged in tasks which are still individually challenging. This latter stage, the challenge, has I think been lacking in my formal unpicked and re-sewn works. After the trial of the first couple such works, in which I did not know what the outcome would look like, the act has become routine. It may explain why it has taken me so long to finish the small patch of linen woven into cotton that I was working on when I started writing this blog in August. It’s done now, but I am unsatisfied with it and have started to paint on it (see below) as I would any other piece of canvas, making the effort of unpicking and re-sewing potentially futile.

I have expanded my processes recently. My works go through several stages: I have added drawing, dyeing, painting and collaging to unpicking and re-sewing, in various orders. These processes completely absorb me, though I am not sure that I would describe them as flow. I tend to go on something of an emotional rollercoaster when I am working. I am excited about the possibilities that are open to me when I first start drawing and painting. I work slowly, stopping to reflect on what I have done and think about what to do next. Because I grind my own paints, from pigments, I add one colour at a time. My anxiety tends to increase as a painting develops, with a fear of messing it up, which can be quite crippling. There will usually be a point when I feel that the painting doesn’t work, and then it is a case of attempting to retrieve it, through collage or unpicking or more painting. 

Nonetheless a part of me is still concerned that I am overly reliant on a method for creation, albeit an expanded one. I am concerned that I add paint to a drawing, or collage a painting, because that is what I have decided my formula is for making art. And in doing so that I am not responding to the individual tensions in a work so that it develops in its own individual way. So, what I have decided to do for the rest of this blog post is to show – to you, but mostly myself - how individual works have developed since my post September's drawings. Through this I hope to see how what I have done has developed the work and whether it is resulted in more complete images. I think I need a few days to properly reflect, and will add a post script with my response to these images in a few days time, but I can see that in each work has developed and evolved, even those with which I have struggled to reach a satisfactory end point.

All photographs: Bridget H Jackson

Post script: I write this having had a good painting day, when I am pleased with the progress I have made with a number of works, and I know where to take others. The thing that has struck me the most in seeing how individual works have developed is the extent to which I idealise earlier stages of a work in my mind. In my mind the drawings were much stronger than the early photographs bear witness to. I have spent a decade or so making minimalist work so maybe it shouldn't come as a surprise to me that I am still drawn to the simplicity of a work at its start. And yet, although I am not entirely happy with the end point of each, I am pleased that each work has improved through evolution, the illusion of each image breaking down. 

I’ve become something of a Merlin James groupie in the past few months, visiting two exhibitions – first at Parasol Unit, now at KW Institute for Contemporary Art – and attending three talks by or about him. My art student-self would be amazed. I had a tutorial with him way back when and having reread my diary entry from the time, after seeing the London show, I don’t think it was a pleasant or productive hour. Sadly I don’t have it with me so I can’t wincingly quote directly from it but the conversation went something along the lines of ‘why are you at art school if you don’t want to take criticism’. No doubt I was at an awkward stage, but I still find that an interesting challenge from someone who I feel avoids explaining his work. Someone who I appreciate as a painter’s painter - who has specialised in the medium, researched parts and painters forgotten by history, and presumably aims to develop it further - but whose work I struggle to understand. The press releases for the shows didn’t help me either, in their statements that his works are ‘enigmatic’, ‘reference modernist painting’ and that he explores the ‘various possibilities of painting pictures today’. James, himself, talks and writes about painting but not about his own work. This post is, I suppose, my way of thinking through his work to try to ‘get it’ and, therefore, one approach to being a painter today. It has been a hard post to write.

James’ subject matter is so broad that it seems incidental to his painterly exploration – ranging from abstracts on transparent fabric displaying the frame and stretcher, to land and seascapes, to sex, to interiors, to ‘portraits’, to works incorporating tiny handcrafted houses. Seen through contemporary art eyes some subjects feel clichéd. A scene of waves breaking on the shoreline is what one expects from a Sunday painter. Individual paintings can come across as unashamedly sentimental, which I can’t help but admire, standing in defiance to a world full of cynicism.  Yet the range of imagery, from abstract to abstracted to representational and figurative, feels a part of that knowing coolness as well. James works the same motif years later and I wonder what drives him to return to similar imagery time and again. In an article from 2008/09, Sherman Sam claims that he choses imagery for its timelessness quality. The same article quotes James from a 2004 exhibition catalogue as saying that his ‘works …  are in the tradition of Western easel painting … [which is] admired for their formal interest and beauty; for how they address the viewer’s wider experience in the world; and for their particular contribution to the art of their field.’

Though the shows at Parasol and at KW Institute have a very different feel, the overriding impression I got on seeing both was one of melancholy. I think that this comes from the colours James’ uses. His palette consists largely of secondary and tertiary colours. Mauves and purples, faded greens, muddy browns, sea greys and some orange. Occasionally the muddy and pastel shades are broken with strokes of primary coloured brightness. His paintings largely show a world of overcast skies and dim electric lights. In such they can’t easily be attributed to season nor time of day; light and time seem to me to be frames of reference.    

The scale of the paintings, modest and easy to imagine in a domestic setting, add to the sense of melancholy. They do not shout with ambition. Apparently the way in which James works varies, with some paintings taking a few hours and others being reworked over weeks, or even years when one looks at the span of dates on some labels. I don’t think I could accurately tell one from the other, they all seem to have a similar level of (in)completeness. The handling of paint varies, at times transparent or glazed, at others in thick impasto layers. But the art of their execution remained largely hidden to me, with the paintings showing neither the energy nor the theatre of the artist’s studio. Theirs is a quieter expression.  

I feel that his overriding concern is about the form of painting, its function as a window on the world. This may of course be me overlaying my frame of reference, my interests, on his work.  What I was drawn to was the layering of canvas, creating a patchwork surface, the piercings to reveal the wall behind, the transparent materials used in some works and the collage or tiny models added to paintings or their frames, all of which break the illusion of what we are looking at. I was also intrigued, but equally repulsed, by the painted surface of works incorporating body hair, presumably from the artist, and the dust, debris and filth of his studio. Of the works on show at the KW Institute about half of the works have some intrusion which disrupts the regular form of the canvas, although all a labeled as being ‘acrylic and mixed media’ (my emphasis).

For someone who works in the tradition of easel painting I find it interesting that James is not particularly interested in the materiality of paint. Acrylic paint comes readymade and easy to use, but has a tradition in art that extends for just over 50 years. Acrylics can produce similar effects to oil paint which, without looking at the labels is what I would have presumed he worked in, but without the associated mess, drying times and conservation problems for artists painting directly onto unprimed canvas. And so for me, James is a painter who does not look to engage completely in the history of the act of painting, but rather in its formal concerns. As such, I share a common area of interest with Merlin James but take a different approach to exploring it, with the physical process being for me the dominant concern. I don't think I like his work per se but having taken time to look and try to understand it I appreciate its complexity, and I know that it is the ambiguity of the work - particularly the breadth of subject matter - which prompted me to look and think harder. More shows which niggled me. 

A quick post from me to show what I have been doing in the last month - that's my intention at least and I hope I shan't be publishing it a thousand words later. These drawings are in various states of development. Most are still works in progress, and probably will be until they are pushed from my attention by something new. I do like to keep tinkering. 

September has been a month in which I have focussed on drawing weeds. Why? As I mentioned in an earlier blog Disruption and Influences I like their tenacity, infiltrating the urban, literally breaking through tarmac sometimes. They are often overlooked, and as a stranger in a new city I am drawn to this aspect of them. I have enjoyed discovering the complexity of their form through drawing. Things that I thought were familiar simple shapes, like nettle leaves, have been revealed as far more intricate when I have tried to put them onto paper or canvas. 

Autumn has definitely arrived here. Though sunny I only managed to draw yesterday in bursts of about an hour before retreating inside to get warm. And the weeds are already showing signs of retreat, some turning brown and withering. Rather than making more drawings my focus will probably shift to working on these further - adding elements from the city, distant views, to break the composition and perspective. I have already sought to break down perspective in some of them through the way in which I added colour, flowing the same colour over different planes of the structure of a plant, or between several plants. Then comes collaging or sewing for the canvas pieces to truly break down and disrupt the image. 

All photographs: Bridget H Jackson
Sorry for the poor quality of some of the images - photographing my work has never a strong point and the light here is pretty poor.