Okay, the name of this blog is ironic, you got that, right? I am not going to claim that there's some monolithic "true art of painting" to be revealed - this is the way to paint, this is what to paint - but there are, nevertheless, questions of truth and authenticity about the acts of painting and drawing that seem always to need answering.
So this blog is born out of my love of these wonderful processes of drawing and painting and my deeply felt need to reassess how I tackle these questions of what to draw, how to draw, why I draw...all emerging out of a hiatus, several years long, in which I scarcely touched pencil or paper, and much of my materials actually date from the 1990s because of this. So it is a rediscovery and a way of orienting myself through a shifting and changing cultural landscape. I want to comment on other people's work, from brief mentions of exhibitions and books to considered critiques,whole and lengthy blog posts.
Nor do I exclude non-traditional media and art-forms from this quest. The extraordinary fuss made some years back about "Britart" seemed to be oblivious of the fact that Marcel Duchamp's "Fountain" was already close to 100 years old, and its centenary is already over. What does this passing of time mean? How does it change the status of a radical piece of a century ago? Equally, the attention paid to new, electronic, media is that anything more than a shift in medium? Is it anything more than massive postmodern hyperbole? Or does it really mean a massive shift in the status and meaning of the "work of art" - assuming we are really talking about works of art anyway - and what we mean by that.
More soon, but meanwhile, here's a picture: