As I ask you to Focus on - Paintings about David Bowie
I have recently considered the validity of making some telephone paintings in the vein of Maholy Nagy as a means of exploring Art in the age of Mechanical reproduction. This is still a salient text but the title is anachronistic. I mean it implies some kind of delay whereas now the dissemination of an image is instant. Also with the arrival of the meme we have managed to weave our over awareness of imagery into language itself. This is Derrida’s idea of the trace gone literally mad if madness is life led by neurosis. I mention this because I think it get me close to the reasons I make paintings in oil on canvas, which in a chronological sense are even more anachronistic. It is understandable that people believe that progress means that using a certain look of painting is not valid as a serious art form because its “been done before”. Sometimes we are more comfortable with a deliberately mechanistic strategy, which unmasks the fake universality of the individual mark of expressio...