Cover (new painting)

Andy Parkinson, Cover, 2013, mixed media on wood panel, 14″ x 14″

Another quick slow

A variation of a pattern that looks visually ‘quick’ at first sight.

However, it can become verrrry slow…

Quaduo 2, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 10″x10″

When you take your time with it.

Only quick at first sight

Whilst this pattern looks visually ‘quick’ it is really only quick at first sight. Prolonged study elicits multiple interpretations.

Quaduo, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 10″x10″

How to encourage the viewer to linger a while, that’s the question.

A few days ago I delivered one of my new paintings to the Old Lockup Studio in Cromford, ready for our pop up show Salon 1, on 18 August. Whilst I was there I tried to persuade Clay Smith and Rachael Pinks that my work took only a few minutes to make and that anyone could do it. When Rachael suggested that there was more thinking time than I was letting on I dismissed her comment, genuinely believing that I did very little of that. Since then I have become more aware of just how long I spend viewing and thinking (sometimes with little or no internal dialogue and sometimes with lots of it – two very different modes of ‘viewing’). Because I enjoy it so much, time flies and I hadn’t been noticing the passing of time. It turns out that it is hours a day, looking, thinking, editing by which I mean turning canvases around to see different variations and paying attention to what changes and how the colour behaves. Early mornings, sometimes I find that I have spent an hour without realising that I had been doing anything it all. And it is through these time distorting experiences that I come to appreciate that these patterns are indeed much slower than they may seem at first sight.

I repeat, repetition is impossible

One of the key operations I am using here is of course repetition. I aim to repeat a line, a move, a colour, a quadrant.

Process and Performance 4, July 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 10″x10″

Yet I discover that I am doing it anew, even when what I thought I was doing was repetition.  I’ll say that last bit again: even when what I thought I was doing was repetition.

Pattern 3

Received wisdom says “twice is a habit three times is a pattern” (of course, it is nonsense). “Two’s company, three’s a crowd” is a similar saying. So this is the last of these sketches from a fragment.

pattern 2 (sketch)

From fragment to pattern 2 (sketch)

From fragment to pattern

I posted about this fragment that I had once cropped from a small painting (oil pastel on paper) and then years after it had been lost or sold I found the cropped edge

I have started to sketch out what a painting might look like based on a repetition of the fragment

David Harvey on the Communist Hypothesis today

Interesting article at Rheomode: David Harvey on the Communist Hypothesis today suggesting that contemporary attempts to revive the communist hypothesis favour horizontally networked as opposed to hierarchically commanded systems, and that this represents a convergence of Marxist and anarchist traditions harking back to the collaborative situation between them in the 1860s.

Slavoj Zizek concludes his book First as Tragedy,then as Farce with a chapter entitled The Communist Hypothesis, in which he argues that the revolutionary process is about repeating the beginning again and again, and that, rejecting any sense of continuity with what the Left meant over the last two centuries, everything should be re-thought, beginning from the beginning that Badiou calls “the communist hypothesis”.

A million lines never precisely repeating

not a million

possibly not even lines

never precisely repeating

Gregory Bateson faced his students with what he said was an aesthetic question: “what pattern connects the crab to the oyster and the orchid to the primrose and all the four of them to me, and me to you?”

Lines of symmetry, erupting into pattern, transforming into speed, colour and line,  a million lines never precisely repeating: the pattern which connects.

This wonderful audio-visual slideshow by Christopher Kinman, posted on The Rhizome Network, is an appreciation of Gregory Bateson entitled The Pattern Which Connects (click on slideshow to view it now).