Artist Statement 2022
Washed-out
Radically Removed
Many tangential areas of enquiry in this larger body of work have fragmented what is not a perfect series, each painting or pair of paintings embody micro-processes stumbled upon during the act of making. The work is essentially process-driven, conveying an exploratory journey through material and method, experiment and accident, doing and undoing. In this work there is always an initial application of pigment with a water-based binder - distemper or tempera - where colour, accumulation of matter, mark making and the immediacy of gesture are collectively significant. Some paintings have remnants of this beginning, yet this initial part of the painting process is then subjected to varying degrees of deconstruction.
The radical removal of pigment and binder - the process of taking paint off - is primary, cyclical and sometimes relentless. What remains, that which is stubborn enough to be embedded into the weave of the 15 ounce canvas, forms a vital part of the remaining image. The surviving fragments of colour, gesture, shape and form, which have permanently stained the canvas, begin a relationship with the visual effects of what has been removed and in some paintings the re-application of new information. What has been dissolved away - sometimes carefully, sometimes vigorously - becomes negative shape. In some pieces the work seems bleached out with raw areas of canvas, shape formed by poured or splashed water, new edges superimpose or overlap surviving layers of pigment. Some of these shapes are coming forward others seem to move back, create depth, introducing a new visual language and texture to the work.
In other pieces there is a more positive application of pigment and binder over the top of the initial deconstructed layers – taking the painting forward into free, physical gesture and a looser exploration of mark making. Colour bleeds out in a watery haze. Pigment intensity is key, differing with each binder, yet there is the stained evidence of rapid gesture. The process of application is indeterminate and embodies creative risk, as the final result is unknown until the paint has fully dried. The work at this stage may go through subsequent processes of removal and reapplication of paint layers until the unity between mark, texture and surface reaches a certain sensation or vibration. The soaked-in surface of the final painting contains the embedded physicality of gesture, the emergence of linear formation and the varying complexities of previous activity underneath.
Artist Statement 2020
My core practice is gestural abstract painting; Abstract Expressionism,particularly the female painters Joan Mitchell and Helen Frankenthaler are a highly significant reference. I make large abstract canvases, working in series of up to 8 or 10 paintings, each series exploring a particular material and compositional process. During the last year my practice has undergone waves of transformation in the studio. I began working with pure pigment and rabbit-skin glue, placing large canvases horizontally, thinning down the distemper with water to create thin washes of pigment: pouring, flicking, swirling and splashing the paint across the surface. I began a process of painting and ‘un-painting’: applying several layers of hot rabbit-skin glue and pure pigment, allowing it to dry over night, then returning to the work to wash away areas of colour in a process I call ‘un-painting’. Following an unpremeditated yet instinctive process, I work intensively not knowing the outcome, generating an action and response dialogue between painter, material and surface.
Making the distemper paintings has been a pivotal moment in my practice and I am still evaluating the changes this work has generated. The work documents process and the act of painting itself: searching for an intrinsic abstract sensation in the final product although following an essentially indeterminate path. Painting is travelling through the experience of gesture and rhythm, the creation of depth, the accumulation of matter; a forensic study of colour, materiality and the experience of making itself. The painter encounters ever deeper levels of conscious experience in a near subliminal dialogue with the material and surface as the work unfolds. Paul Klee’s ‘taking a walk with a line,’ his ‘rendering visible’ and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s making visible the ‘invisible’ are vitally significant in my approach.
The current body of work is a return to oil-based media, using wax as the basis for combining pure pigment and oils. I have continued to work horizontally allowing a similar process to unfold: applying pigment mixed with large quantities of wax solution in rhythmic gestural strokes, spotting, splashing, swirling and looping. Using the pigment-oil-wax method, the paint remains workable for some time allowing for the evolution of long continuous meandering gestures and intuitive linear configurations. I am in the process of discovery again. After successive stages of accumulating matter, I have found I can remove layers of pigment in selected areas using metal tools to scrape through still-soft pigmented wax, in an extensive excavation of the surface. Again painting and un-painting, yet something new is beginning to emerge via depth, texture and surface: a deeper level of optical and bodily sensation, something I need to continue to work with.
Through making both the Distemper Paintings and the Pigment-Wax Series, I am beginning to reach another level of understanding of what an indeterminate approach can produce in making abstract painting. By listening to electronic music while painting the process of production becomes one of total immersion in a rhythmic state – something I have begun to call a hyper-present state - in which one operates within rhythm, within sound and vibration. Everything occurs simultaneously, in synthesis, in a return to immediacy which seems even more urgent while connected to technological sound and the energy it creates.
Rebecca Meanley