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Slow painting. Oil is slow, acrylic quicker and digital quickest. This can be reversed, but is generally the case. The speed of oil painting fits to the gentle unfolding of ideas. It works with a nuanced and tempered exploration of the mental and physical milieu. Slow painting is not something that necessarily challenges capitalism, or the rate at which capital demands production. We shouldn’t use it in this way, because capitalism will win anyway, so painting shouldn’t bother itself with such a contest. It’s more that the slowness is the natural pace irrespective of what capital wants, and that should be protected. The reason, aside from it being a style of life, is that there are qualities unique to painting in this way that cannot be arrived at in any other way.
Fast painting. Painting can be quick. The canvas support and paint can capture a performing body and hold its traces forever. It can capture the vitality of life in gestures and accidents. Violently scumbled brush marks take us to when they were made. De Kooning’s lines whip around his paintings and we follow them like a racetrack. Or, Warhols can be mass-made, by hand. Quick hand. Fast painting machines. There can be an urgency to painting. This is quite Romantic.
Painting should not be instrumentalised. Because for this we pay a sacrifice, which is the loss of artistic agency. I’m reluctant to use the word freedom instead of agency, because then the debate tips into the politicised issues around free speech. So I won’t. We can’t go round saying we want to be free, because then we’d get instrumentalised by the right.
Placement. There are different attitudes to composition. De Kooning is dynamic and fluid, with lines holding together form. Drawing is key. They’re elastic. De Keyser is static and uses placement. Form is nudged into place and in spite of the casual application of paint, is placed perfectly. I’m a placer.
The Waves. When I painted The Waves I wanted to get the sense of the movement of a wave as it swallows the body. Its tumbling movement and circular qualities. I didn’t want the beach to be sand-coloured, or the water to be blue, or the wave to look like a wave. The painting had to be the essence of a wave.