A new day and a new painting for Dark Movements just off the starting blocks. This afternoon I’ve been playing with pattern examining the the shapes made by my dis-articulating Jordan Morley maquettes. I want the figure in the new painting, titled Flowering Skin, to be half in and half out of his jacket. These paper garments have become quite complicated affairs, constructed from shapes that swivel on both fixed and travelling points of attachment, so that by means of sliding bars, they can actually be moved off and away from the maquette bodies they were fitted to.
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I like the abstracted flying panels, and don’t worry at all about them conforming to how a three-dimensional textile garment behaves when wrapped about a body. Here, positive and negative shapes are what I’m most interested in, and at some level, the fact that all garments can be taken apart and rendered as the templates they’re constructed from. I find that intriguing, like hidden maps of the body.
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Right now my drawings for this haven’t come together in the way I want. The segmented figure (see below) is too doll-like, the garment is too well organised, and the kinetic, frenzied dynamic is missing.
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I have to get this piece moving. This is not the slumbering Jordan of The Quickening and Yarden. Moreover it’s complicated by the fact that the core element of the painting is to be the skin, and what is flowering on it. The recent tulips from Yarden have set my mind on an outcome that’s quite hard to quarry out of the surrounding rock. But as experience tells me, I don’t do this stuff to have an easy life!
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And to get to the destination, I have to dance all around the bushes!
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Sometimes to help navigate to the next stage of an idea, I compile a ‘mood-board’ of drawings from my archive to show aspects of what I need. Here are a few that seem to be speaking to me at the moment.
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Clive Hicks-Jenkins' Artlog: 