Choice and Why

I suppose quite a few people would call Karel Appel’s ‘The City’ a pretty awful daub, crude, confusing and strange.

It seemed to me that it was dashed off and hurled into the world. But it also seemed to come straight out of the identity. I’m a bit jealous of Appel’s ability to mine his identity.

The painting says ‘Hate me if you like, go on, walk past - why would I care? You think I’m ugly? well so do I. You think you can see right through me? No shit Sherlock - I’m transparent.’

This painting is feisty, and I may have an inkling of how the Appel woman is feeling; running on wrath, naked, vulnerable and raging.

Why did the National Museum of Wales buy this picture? Maybe the little red dragon played a part, who knows?

I chose it for its scale, its brutish power, its lack of finesse, and perhaps because the more I produce overly controlled careful paintings the more I admire go-wild undressed- up raw expression.

Appel portrays the city. I am from the city. I like the works of man. Since I became rusticated through circumstance and mistake I feel both excited and estranged when I revisit London. Appel's city conjures a suggestion of alienation that chimes with me, a confused imagery that resonates. On first viewing the painting I didn’t know what on earth it was about.

Now, when in London, I get a strange and slightly disturbing sensation that I’m ‘self-spectating’, sharply aware of the uncontrollable city around my head. I don’t know what this real city is about either. The likely truth is - everything.

The Appel woman just finds it all incomprehensible. So do I. We have something in common.

She and me are just concentrating on not falling over the edge of the world - just until it becomes rather necessary, if not compulsory.

Process and Evaluation


Is anyone a simple soul?
Never the less my process is simple, and hasn’t changed much, though it’s possible it should.

I simply draw from my head in small sketchbooks, and write a lot of words down. I’m mostly interested in the ideas that have spawned these drawings. Then I choose the ones I like best and work from them at a bigger scale, during which process they may change quite considerably.

I used the fact that Karel Appel’s painting incorporated imagery that crops up often in my work - a solitary female, wise animals, ambiguities and doom. Some of the imagery that I’ve had rolling around in my head have acquired different significances as more nuanced interpretations have crawled out from underneath it, though I didn’t know they were there. Their mad and anxious richness surprised me.

A sneaking, though definitely irrelevant, suspicion persists that maybe Karel Appel didn’t know either.

So I bounced off the imagery, but not initially the scale, which I had a clear early intention of doing. Towards the end of the project I’ve started to manage to do this, on a possibly doomed mission to re-invent myself. I can’t evaluate this as it’s all just potential.

I have found it absorbing, and have liked the thinking it has provoked. Someone said that ‘all art comes from art’ , which may or may not be true but we do stand on the shoulders of giants. Not that I believe Karel Appel was necessarily a giant.

The writing and documenting has surprised me by its revelatory nature, to the extent that I now feel more cautiously pleased with the blog than the actual work. I think this may have something to do with the amount of ambivalence in it. I’m partial to ambivalence.

Resolution is a rare thing; I’m not sure it’s possible for an artist. Meantime there’s always some kind of dilemma. What else is possible when looking through microscopes at stuff that is too small, or looking at the cosmos when we can’t see it all?