If you see something that doesn’t look right (after Hammershoi), 2021
pigment and gum arabic on hardback book cover
25.2 x 18 cm
9 7/8 x 7 1/8 in
We have been in the flat a year, and I am still energised by its spaces, these great high Glasgow ceilings. A visiting friend says the flats here remind him...
We have been in the flat a year, and I am still energised by its spaces, these great high Glasgow ceilings. A visiting friend says the flats here remind him of Vienna. I think of Copenhagen and the muted palette of Hammershoi, those empty rooms he painted, echoing with the sadness and loss he and his wife felt after her miscarriage. The emptiness of our rooms is more to do with not being able to find any furniture we like. I set myself up and paint in one room, looking through the hall into the back room. The subject is space itself. We still don’t know how to quite occupy it yet or fill it, what the function of the rooms are.
There is a particular Hammershoi painting from 1905 called 'Open Doors' showing just that, a room with two doors opening onto other rooms. The rooms are empty but full of presence. The bit that gets me is the top of the door jamb, which has a wobble, a warp to the wood. There is one above our kitchen window. Is it Some sort of structural defect? Subsidence? It is kind of pleasing to the eye, maybe not to a surveyor or estate agent. This wobble of Hammershoi’s is so strange, so wrong, or rather not right, which is not quite the same thing.
“If something doesn’t look right” , an automated voice on the train says, “report it to the guard”. “See it, say it, sort it”. I say this to myself when painting and trying to get it right. Quite a lot doesn’t look right, and a lot of the time… but sorting it is easier said than done.
These are paintings, I dare say, that deal with lock down, those strange isolated isolating conditions that we have all had to endure and sometime enjoy.
We had a lovely time at first, despite the terrible news: great meals, long lies in bed, cycles to the studio on empty roads (the city looking like a Giorgio de Chirico painting) guiltily painting for long hours, somewhat undercover and illegal, films at night, no school for Joseph.
Locked down. Locked in. How thrilling that word ‘lock-in’ used to seem, the promise of an illicit after-hours drink, that magic Irish bar in Camberwell we used to drink in, they brazenly bent every licensing law. We got to know the knock that would get you in.
Feeling sad some days. Looking out the window to the world below. Wept for a day gone by. What have I achieved today? Nothing. A few marks on an old book. For the first time I kind of get Howard Hodgkin and his process of inactivity and small gesture action. Doing nothing, an oxymoron. Hodgkin seemed to be on the verge of tears all the time, and always moaning.
All my past is here somehow, my present and future too. Wandering the flat then back to work. This must be how writers live, characters, situations, conversations jostling for space with their every day here-and-now. Their situation is often bound up with domesticity. I’d hate to be a writer.
At least Painters move around a bit on their feet.
Generally I’ve always felt it was important to leave the house and go to a studio, to travel to work. Artists mostly find themselves in old, emptied factories (plenty of these in Glasgow.) They spend their days fighting the cold and damp.
Lucien Freud seemed to prefer flats, as did those other London painters like Auerbach, Bacon.
I find myself making some paintings from life. ______________________________________________________
Ten recent paintings:
Winter vegetables ( to Robert Bell Cranston); watching the box; Wept for a day gone by; If you see something that doesn’t look right (after Hammershoi); snow globe; On the corner ( the way Jude stood); Keramic ( an everyday intrusion of someone I didn’t like); Messages; Landing; Without you
Ten recent paintings all made with pigment and gum arabic. These paintings have something to do with being inside, indoors all this time. Not just in the period of making but the time before, this period of time since March 2020, the time of covid and lockdowns. Still lifes, interiors, views from the window.
The focus has been very narrow and the aim small.
I’ve felt a bit ill, not very ill but slightly ill. I haven’t had covid but Lorna has. I don’t feel strong. I feel weak. I cry easily. I feel like making slight gestures in my paintings, a breath on a window pane, steam from the kettle, a spiders web ( which are actually very tough really, relatively, feats of engineering.) When I walk to the shops for milk and bread ( for “messages” as they say in Scotland) I feel dizzy. I wonder if it’s because of the sudden change of space, that my horizon opens up and seems overwhelmingly big, a world without walls. I hurry back indoors. To the security of walls, interior space. I feel like making work that is hardly there at all, something gentle like my mums home-baking. I think about a dark brown apricot cake she made and her meringues, chewy perfect off-white meringues, my mum’s magical alchemy. I feel close to my long dead parents just now. I miss them but I’m glad they missed all this.
I feel slightly alienated from the world at the moment actually, from its concerns. These paintings are saying nothing of any significance and I’m not even sure what, if anything, they might communicate to anyone else, other than relating something about the awareness - the ‘nowness of now’ as Dennis Potter called it - of being in a specific time and space. You ( reader, viewer) are in your space, and each of us are locked into something, our situation and feelings. Together in alone-ness.
I am painting like an old lady just now. I am thinking of Vanessa Bell, Gwen John maybe even Agnes Martin. Artists that retreated and worked secretively, quietly. I feel I’ve retreated just now. I Can’t face the studio. The building where the studios are is the HQ for New York Times during COP 26 and so the security is tight, we have to get searched and show a pass we’ve been issued with. Lorna has been going and comes back a bit annoyed that she has to explain who she is and what she’s doing with a bag full of turps bottles. I can’t be bothered explaining so am staying in the house…’ working from home’, which is strange. In between painting I make soup and stews and do laundry. The paintings are being made accumulatively, little marks here and there, building to something. I feel like I am on an artists residency, lots of my stuff, materials and research information, is not around me. I feel limited in a useful way, I am looking much more at what is around, out the window and in the flat, under my nose, exploring.
These paintings have nothing to say and they are saying it.
A plane circles in the sky all day over Partick and Finnieston looking for suspicious activity and it is said that above that plane, high above the clouds, is another plane hardly visible also circling, watching the watcher. Air of paranoia. The radio announces that the threat of a likely terrorist attack has been moved from substantial to severe. More incentive to stay in.