I Never Done Good Things.....
I posted an image of a recent piece of work on Facebook, yesterday, to mark what would have been the seventy-second birthday of David Bowie. The post, and the text which accompanies the painting, can be seen below. As I say in the Facebook post, I don't usually like to explain the work in this way. Yesterday, however, I thought it might be of interest to unpick some of the visual language of this particular painting, as it references Bowie's own back-catalogue of work. In some ways, it seemed to me, the reflexive dialogue within the making of the painting mirrored some of the self-referencing that typified a part of David Bowie's own writing process. Though I feel that this kind of forensic explanation of the making of an image, through analysis of some of the creative thought processes that go into such work, somewhat instrumentalises the business (or 'magic') of painting, I nevertheless find it an interesting exercise to have to lay open the practice in this manner. What also becomes quickly apparent, when attempting to explain a painting in this way, is how inadequate the written or spoken word is in trying to articulate that which is thought and felt throughout the painting process. Painting is, of course, a visual language - and one which contains, perpetuates, and reinvents its own codes. To reiterate what has been said before, elsewhere, painting pre-figures or comes before the spoken and written word - surely, for this reason, the visual language of paint is able to convey much more than the image represented or any amount of words written about it. Or, perhaps, that is a flight of fancy?
