This essay is a discussion of my practice, which I have termed ‘the problems of paint.’ My practice is fundamentally based on, and is an exploration into, the problems of paint and its premises. In this I acknowledge from the outset the problems and the complexities of painting as received forms through history. My practice, in part, responds to historical ‘truths’ in both art history and philosophy, out of which I present my work as a contemporary proposal that denies the so-called modernist myths of painting.

I will attempt to give a written account of the issues that I have confronted as an artist and how these have motivated me to enter into the wider discourse of what I consider to be, literally, a visual language. I have set off on my exploration by taking painting as a given, or as a found object. For example, I use the traditional limiting factors of painting such as a quadrangular frame stretched with canvas and covered with oil paint. By doing this I avoid the needless theorisation that would come with shifting from the near archetypical structure of painting. It might thus be said that I am investigating painting from the inside out.

+ I will set off here with a question that was put to me at the beginning of this year by a tutor: what is painting? This question seems at first glance to be a fundamental one in regards to carrying out this practice at all. For surely ‘to paint’ as a ‘real’ painter/artist should implies a knowledge that they know (or can come to know) what painting is? For the layman this question may not often be asked, or when it is, it may be directed in naïve amusement towards advanced painting that they don’t ‘understand’. Importantly, this question has become for me one of my ‘problems of paint’. It has come to entail rather, not a question of meaning, but a questioning of the question.

Again, glancing at this question, there is provocation to give some sort of definitive answer- because a question usually demands an answer. I am not suggesting that the tutor who asked me ‘what is painting’ intended that I find, or even search for, such an answer. However, out of its sheer stupidity as a question, (dumb like the question of the meaning of life) I have become more aware of considering my practice as an ongoing process of exploration rather than an ultimate one.

Before I discuss my practice further, I wish to stay with this question of ‘what is painting’, in order to establish a contextual base from which I will continue. It is out my evaluation of the possible origins of this question that my practice has been extended. This question, I believe, has its roots in not just modernism but in the enlightenment movement on which it was supported. The question ‘what is painting’ has taken, for myself, the artist, an even more personal form, ‘why do I paint?’ Both of these questions have a dependence on the subject-centred reason that formed in the enlightenment and remained a feature of modernism.

Rene Descartes*, (1596-1650) was one of the founders of enlightenment thought. Cogito ergo sum (‘I think therefore I am’) is the starting point for Descartes system of knowledge. In his Discourse on the Method (1637), he observes that the proposition ‘I am thinking, therefore I exist’ (je pense, donc je suis) is ‘so firm and sure that the most extravagant suppositions of the sceptics were incapable of shaking it.’ Descartes’ philosophy considered knowledge in terms of the meaning of the word ‘I’. That the key to knowledge was to be found in a formulation about the word ‘I’ shows the beginning of a new understanding of the human place in the world. The ‘self’ became an issue, a point of fundamental instability in the world. It was the Enlightenment that made the modern era the era of the subject.

Descartes formula, cogito ergo sum, stands at the head of the modern tradition of Western thought, that has seen the conscious processes of observation, analysis and logic as the key instruments in the search for objective truth. I have outlined this foundational formula on which further enlightenment thinkers such as Kant and Rousseau built, to establish a lineage of the ‘truths’ that underprop the kind of modernist ideology my practice rejects.

The work of Martin Heidegger is important for an understanding of the role of the Enlightenment- and the work of Rene Descartes in particular- that has defined the contemporary view of the history of modern thought about subjectivity . Heidegger’s project was to define our place in the world not in terms of some artificial construct of ‘self’, but in terms of the most fundamental aspect of life: Being itself. To Heidegger, there could be nothing more fundamental than the fact that we are. Any other determination of the basic structures of human life must come after that.

For Heidegger, the Cartesian assumption of a radical split between knowing subject and inert object of knowledge has led to a world in which the detached superiority of the scientist becomes the model and ground of all existence. ‘Instead of experiencing the world as a texture through which we come to be, world is observed as an inert material body to be manipulated through a series of dualisms generated by the subject object split (mind/body, spirit/matter, reason/emotion, masculinity/femininity). Modernity is thus a condition defined by a characteristic denial or disavowal of Being-in-the-world.’

Heidegger’s critique of Cartesianism as the founding methodology of modernity, one which he saw as productive of the violences of the West and inadequate as a grounds for knowledge, has become a root for the post-modern tendencies that have developed in the later 20th century. What the diverse critical positions of postmodernism share is a suspicion of subject-centred reason or philosophies of consciousness, a tendency that has become part of a gathering critique of modernity.

In my practice I carry an awareness that follows this critique of modernity and Cartesianism. Nick Mansfield recognises that in our dealing with the social institutions of representative democracy (courts, parliaments and bureaucracies), our sense of selfhood is constantly falling back on enlightenment motifs . My feelings are that Cartesian subjectivities are still present in the way I am encouraged to approach my practice (in the institution). I feel that the questions ‘what is painting’ or ‘why do I paint’ to be of a subject centred Cartesian lineage whereas I feel I experience my practice as a visual process in a constant state of becoming. To use Heideggarian phrasing, I experience my practice as a ‘texture’ through which it comes to be. Beneath the structure of the question ‘what is painting’ is the even more fundamental issue: we may be able to talk about how we experience and know painting, but what does it mean that there ‘is painting’ in the first place? The issues here are not ‘what is painting’ nor ‘why do I paint’, but that there is painting, and in regards to my practice, that I paint. This is a conclusion similar to that reached by Jacques Derrida in his The Truth in Painting. The false optimism raised in the title turns out to be a convoluted tease as Derrida at the end of near 400 pages concludes simply that ‘There is painting, writing restitutions, that’s all.’ I do not take this position (‘that I paint’) for granted.

I carry in my practice scepticism towards grand narratives- mythic structures used widely in the twentieth century as a way of regrounding human experience. Jean-Francois Lyotard defines the modern era as the era of grand narratives. These understand human history as a collective progress through time to a specific goal such as the maximum realisation of the human spirit, the creation of a free and just society or the perfect operation of society as an efficient economic machine. These were a feature of high modernism, which my work reacts against. Patricia Waugh, in her reader Postmodernism, lists this scepticism of grand narratives as one of the broad senses in which postmodernism can be taken. It might be assumed that my rejection of the modernist ethos makes me a postmodernist. However, I do not consider myself to be a postmodernist, particularly because I don’t set out to make art that is necessarily illustrative of postmodern theories. I can only say that have felt the critical ‘shift’ known as postmodernism and have an awareness of it in my practice.

+ I have been concerned for some time about the role of painting today, hence the seriousness that I took with the two earlier questions. I developed a larger and more specific question- ‘Why do I do what I do with a pre-industrial craft in a digital age?’ My concern, naïve at first, was two pronged. Firstly, having survived numerous speculations of its immanent death by photography in the nineteenth century, how could painting continue to be a potent medium of expression in this digital age where the mass reproduced has come to be a defining feature of western culture? How does painting fare against seemingly infinitely more alluring surfaces such as cinema or even the gathering force of multi-media? Though I have accepted that painting will never simply die out, could its voice be slowly withdrawn to a whimper? Why, despite experiencing this ‘age’ myself, does the act of painting feel such a ‘right’ thing to do?

My second general concern was theoretical or art historical in nature. In my early knowledge of art history, painting was the most potent medium of progressive art movements in the first half of the twentieth century. I was also superficially aware of the elevated status of the high modernist painters. How had painting come to been seen in progressive art since?

These central considerations will be developed later in this essay. In response to these, I have come to ground my practice in process, which I will discuss first. My emphasis on process has allowed a free exploration into what it is to paint. I do not consider process as ‘form over content’ as the Formalists did. I am emphasising that process (or ‘playing with paint’) is of as much importance as a finished work to me in my practice.

My processes are both additive and subtractive (and occasionally destructive). I first developed an experimental ‘drag’ technique in response to the marks made in a work by Gerhard Richter from his Abstrakes Bild series. This speculative technique, with which I have experimented widely, involves the use of varying lengths of wood, metal or perspex to scrape paint both onto and off the canvas. I experience this process of painting as being less contrived than that with a brush, and allows me a freedom from which I can exploit the material nature of paint. The act of painting involves, for me, an especially physical, immediate and explicit process based relationship with paint. Conscious representation is thereby largely removed from the process of painting.

Earlier in this essay I tried to establish an argument that I should not need to qualify ‘why I paint’, by arguing what is more important, or immediate, is ‘that I paint’ or ‘that there is painting’. While this still holds, I need to give a further account of my reasons for painting.

Before I am a painter I am a visual artist. Yet I have subjectively chosen to identify in my practice with the medium of painting at this time. I cannot hope to give a definitive answer of why I paint, but I may be able to suggest through subjectivity why I cannot stop.

Painting is an obsession. I can become completely immersed in a canvas at an almost unconscious level. My personality has influenced my desires to be close, involved and direct in the way I interact with paint. As a side effect I experience an almost cathartic response to the act of painting. My experiences whilst engaging in these processes are nearly indefinable, however I can relate to Jackson Pollock’s ambition ‘to be in the painting’.

As I have already affirmed, my attraction to painting lies particularly in the process of painting. Said simply, I enjoy painting. However, I am not always consciously aware that in making my marks I am making a painting. Mark making becomes less conscious or unconscious, and more intuitive or responsive to the paint that has gone before- I work trying to allow something to emerge. I promote uncertainty, and sometimes from this I feel like I did as a child reading ‘pick a path’ books. Process overrides the idealism of outcome.

Aida Tomescue speaks similarly about her process. ‘I stay with a canvas until the work breaks through the plans I make, trying to find a reality in the work which my consciousness cannot deny or make unreal. There is a point when the surface I’ve been working with becomes very responsive, opening up intriguing possibilities. Then I stop having choices and start inhabiting the work. It is at this point that painting begins.’

I have found also that through the process of painting I have developed a higher degree of personal introspection. I become more aware of my self over what I am doing. Yet, unlike in painting the fence, this is not a null sense of awareness of self. It was said with some profundity in my introduction that the question, ‘what is painting’, was ‘dumb like the meaning of life’. I will not dwell on an analogy between painting and life, because to do so would be dumb. However, in a very personal way, my practice of painting has begun to develop like a life journey- it’s a visual journey.

Thomas McEvilley, in his essay I am is a Vain Thought, examines how the idea of the self is central to cultural development as a whole. McEvilley cites three principal, ongoing reconfigurings of the definition of the self as postmodern examples: the self as constantly changing consciousness, a stream of impressions and thoughts with no apparent unifying principal; the self as a corporal event that is the temporary by-product of molecules combined in certain ways; and the self as a soul that is not dependant on consciousness or molecular structures but rather which survives the destruction and decay of both. McEvilley compares Western concepts of the self with cross cultural views, paying special attention to the Buddhist idea of ‘not-self’, or soullessness and applies them to examine the impending robotization of civilisation. Paying close attention to the notion of self as issuing from a ‘false attitude’, McEvilley writes: ‘what we regard as an enduring and unified centre of subjectivity is not a constant thing, but an ever-flowing process.’ To me, this is an agreeable derivation on Heidegger’s argument; that the subject is not a naturally occurring thing, but a philosophical category of thought that arose at a certain point in history, and will be supplanted by more convincing models of what the human experience of the world is like.

My subjective approach to painting agrees with McEvilley’s ‘ever-flowing process’ of Self. In my practice, the process itself becomes enough of an outcome.

I noted earlier that my process of painting is a very responsive one; to my materials and to the paint that has already been laid down. Because my processes are so responsive, I do not see painting as simply a matter of conscious choices. I do not recognise that I am making judgements. I recognise only that I am painting- whatever that means. Yet through my processes I still work towards painting a valid, proper picture- but without knowing what one should look like.

For this reason I have considered the role of aesthetics in my practice of painting. I do not know precisely the role aesthetic consideration has in my practice. I feel that if there are determinate aesthetic qualities they must act as an unconscious undercurrent in how I respond to my surfaces in both the adding and subtracting of paint. The 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant was concerned with judgements of taste. Objects are judged beautiful, he proposed, when they satisfy a disinterested desire: one that does not involve personal interests or needs. It follows from this the aesthetic objects have no specific purpose and that judgements of beauty are not expressions of mere preference but are universal. Although one cannot be certain that others will be satisfied by objects he or she judges to be beautiful, one can at least say that others ought to be satisfied. The basis for ones response to beauty exists in the structure of one’s mind.

In his Immanuel Kant, Lucien Goldmann cites the early Lukacs’s view that ‘Kant’s Critique of Judgement contains the seeds of a reply to every problem of structure in the sphere of aesthetics; aesthetics need thus only clarify and think through to the end that which is implicitly there to hand’. Tony Bennett, in his essay Really Useless ‘Knowledge’- A political critique of aesthetics, argues that the Critique of Judgement does provide a clear statement of ‘every problem of structure in the field of aesthetics’, ‘but less by way of resolving these problems or anticipating their resolution, than by specifying the conditions that

would need to met were they to be resolved.’

Kant is the starting point from which Bennett gives a Marxist analysis of the production, functioning and effects of artistic practices and their relationship to ideology. This is to be done, he says, by locating them in the ‘spheres of social and cultural action that are produced for them by the forms of classification, valorisation and institutional use through which they are inscribed within, and articulated across, different regimes of power, its exercise and its contestation’. In this analysis, the categories of aesthetic thought are useless, and even worse: a positive hindrance to adequate understanding. Bennett proposes we should dump this ‘really useless form of knowledge’.

Colin Lyas’ Aesthetics, chapter 8 provides commentary and critique of communicative meaning in relation to aesthetics. He shows through the writings of key figures the failures of Cartesian determinate meaning built on intention, which pervades Modernist ideological thought. He looks at three sources of the claim that the intentions of artists are irrelevant to the determination of the meaning of their works. These are: Beardsley and Wimsatt, whose article The Intentional Fallacy, began Anglo-American debate; structuralism; and the poststructuralism of Derrida. The progression of thought begins with Beardsley and Wimsatt asserting the possibility of determinacy of meaning but denying that what gives an utterance its determinacy is the intentions of individual consciousness. Determinate meaning rather is possible because of structures of rules of grammar and meaning. This view is shared by Roland Barthes and the structuralists who have a deeper scepticism about the existence of individual meaning determining consciousness. They support the notion that determinacy depends on the existence of structures of rules of grammar and meaning. However the next stage in this progression occurs because, just as determinacy is not given to an utterance by an individual act of willing, neither is a determinate meaning guaranteed by the existence of structures of rules of grammar and meaning, for those rules could not close down the openness of our language. What seems to follow is the impossibility of determinacy of meaning and that determinacy is not to be had at all.

Two assertions, that neither the will nor the rules of language determine meaning, become premises that entail, for Derrida, a denial of the possibility of determinacy of meaning. Despite this, in Derrida’s writing he does not make the apocalyptic claim that the determinacy necessary for communication is impossible. Rather, he is attacking the dualistic Cartesian mind/body split as the only possible picture connecting meaning and intention, mind and world.

With an awareness of this kind of discourse it becomes problematic to speak determinately of aesthetic judgements in my process of painting. This has not adversely affected the way in which I approach painting because I do not carry any conscious concern to make paintings with an objective aesthetic. Instead, aesthetic attitudes such as Derrida’s seem to nod towards the open-endedness of my processes. I have come to understand that in my practice, it is not so much the individual works that are important, but the uninterrupted succession of paintings that are the outcome of my greater explorations into ‘the problems of paint’.

In terms of the viewer, I am less comfortable with Barthes term ‘death of the author’ than with his later re-phrasing ‘birth of the reader’. I do not perceive the relationship between myself, the artist, and the viewer with the same blatant exchange of power that might be suggested in ‘death of the author’. Instead, ‘birth of the reader’ represents for me the active role of the viewer in interpreting my work. When I elect to show my work I am offering it to be seen, more than to be critiqued by the viewer. The distinction is important: my offering of the work to the viewer should not to be taken for granted. I expect no absolute meaning to be found. I hope only that the viewer might add to a work, rather than taking over it. Similarly, a viewer understanding of some of the issues that affected the conception of a work within my practice might lead them to further questions for consideration. I hope for the showing of my work to be mutually beneficial and open.

My primary concern with process that I have spoken of does not negate all consideration for meaning in my practice. Process becomes a vehicle for making my concerns and investigations in paint visible. I have come to consider an aspect of meaning in my work to relate to the word ‘code’. This idea of ‘code’ involves both the visual and conceptual sides of my work. I recognise that certain cultural codes are always acting in the way we view painting per se as important cultural objects. Code has become a way to concretely talk around my practice. I believe that its ambiguity as a word makes it a suitable term to represent my multifaceted conflicts with meaning in my mark making.

I will discuss first the relationship between my paint processes and code in analogical terms. I have raised earlier in this essay a questioning about my painting in the digital age. With this in mind it can be said with some truth that I have come to see a relation between my processes and this ‘digital’ or ‘information’ age. I do not set out to explicitly represent digital coding in any way. ‘Code’ has become a covert term for how I think about the marks on the canvas that result from my ‘drag’ technique. My process of dragging paint across the canvas surface results in thousands of little skips of paint dashed across the surface. I consider these dashes of paint (which are not contrived marks like those of brushstrokes) to be analogous to ‘bytes of information’ or ‘digital code’. This analogy is particular to the way I see binary code visually flowing on a screen. Selectively I see my dashes of paint also as bits (or bytes) of information that make up the system known as a painting.

In ‘code’ I refer also to Bitmap, a computer program in which paintings can become digitalised into a map of dots. Similarly, a visual analogy can be drawn between this map of dots and my dashes of paint which appear as if they were themselves pixilated. ‘Code’ alludes to a fragmentation or dislocation that relates visually between my ‘problems of paint’ and the digital age.

I acknowledge that this is a personal, subjective interpretation of my paint marks. As such, I do not expect the viewer (although many have) to draw on a similar analogy as myself to ‘digital code’. In one sense my paint drag can be seen as a purely abstract mark making. In another, the complexities of my surfaces in their patterning and underlying grid often induce a response from viewers in some way related to my notion of ‘paint code’ or the digital.

I do not set out to explicitly represent code because this would largely negate my reasons for painting. Although I do not represent code, the word ‘code’ can be used in many ways to represent my work. Code is not the subject of my work, however I have found its presence acting as an undercurrent to how I think about the marks I make on the canvas surface in connection to meaning. Thomas McEvilley, in his essay I am is a Vain Thought, examines how the idea of self is central to cultural development as a whole. McEvilley states: ‘Today the question of the self can be clearly focused by its relation to artificial intelligence’. Perhaps my perception of my paint dashes as a pixilated paint ‘code’ is an unconscious side effect of this?

The second aspect of ‘code’ that I will now address refers to the conceptual side of my practice. I acknowledge that painting is an esoteric language. In my work interpretative meaning is polysemic and degrees of understanding will depend on prior knowledge of the visual language of paint. For example, despite my drawing of a visual analogy between my paint marks and (binary) code, meaning behind these marks is still seems very much ‘encoded’.

Jacques Aumont in The Image suggests ‘Images exist only to be seen by a historically defined viewer, that is to say, by a viewer who deploys particular frameworks to process them.’ This first quote is a question about whether or not there is something specific about the image, alluding to codes that may be acting in the reception of an image. Roland Barthes (1964) wrote ‘There is no such thing as a naive image, one which innocently represents objective reality. On the contrary, any image conveys numerous connotations derived from social codes which are themselves subject to ideologies.’ Christian Metz went on to propose that analogy itself is coded. In other words, analogy is culturally determined through and through. Metz’s main point is to stress that any image, however perfectly analogical it seems, is used and understood by means of social conventions which always rely, in the last instance, on language (one of the basic postulates of semio-linguistics). The semiological project notes that many codes are used in relation to the image, from the almost universal ones (such as perception) to the more social (such as analogic codes ) to those most thoroughly determined by the social context. The mastery of these different codes would logically be unequal for different viewers and their historical situations, which would in turn give rise to differing interpretations.

To refer to these codes (which are usually unspoken and often unrecognised) is to make explicit their presence in the way I think about my work and my practice. For example, these codes have affected the way that I have received painting as a worthwhile artistic pursuit since the high modernist painters. In this period these codes could be seen as explicitly active as anywhere, and may be best summed up in Ad Reinhardts dictum that ‘Art has never painted anything but itself’. Because I have chosen so consciously to identify with painting in my practice (a medium with such a long tradition), I have had to come to terms with such codes that, in their sheer historical weight, threaten to destabilise my practice.

A relationship between my visual and contextual codes is this: whilst the pixilated appearance of my paint drag marks may be visually analogous to digital coding, these same indeterminate paint dashes have also become a metaphor for cultural codings of painting that I confront in my ‘problems of meaning’ and ‘problems of paint’.

I will now return to discuss the historical issues of painting through modernism that have been of concern to me, in how I may continue to paint meaningfully since. I feel the historical weight that painting carries in my practice. Therein I have always taken an intense interest in both historical and contemporary approaches to painting. My purpose here, beyond personal interest, is to be sufficiently informed of the possible contexts to which my work may be subjected. While this may seem elementary it has become an emphasis, as I consider my painted proposals to be consciously located within the greater discourse of painting.

I will briefly outline a thread of movements and issues of most consequence to how I have received painting. This is in order to shed light on my gradual re-evaluation of issues such as function and meaning within my practice.

Clement Greenberg, the driving critical force behind formalist aesthetics dominant in the 1950s, had two main points: firstly, art is in perpetual crisis, having lost its religious function since Kant. He considered the aura of art challenged by industrialisation and sought to separate high art from kitsch, which he saw as a bye product. Secondly, he saw modernism as a process in which art was defining itself, moving towards a point where art was just talking about itself. Greenberg saw painting as essentially developing as, and being about, pigment quality, flat surface, the shape of the support and opticality. Most clearly argued in his 1960 essay Modernist Painting, Greenberg argued that all artists were subliminally working through this process, irrespective of their actual motives. Relying on a selective morphology of traditional art to project these values, Greenberg advocated an objective form of painting. This work with its emphasis of form over content became known as formalism. Greenberg sought to elevate work that both fitted his theories and suited his aesthetic to a transcendental high art status. Greenberg thus tried to impose his personal aesthetic across art as a universal. He tried to valorise a universal aesthetic using Kant, who believed aesthetics (an intuition of the imagination) to be unable to communicate ideas and vice versa.

Loaded with ideology, ‘high modernism’ was eventually overcome by at least two major shifts in critical theory and art practice. These were Structuralism and later Post-Structuralism , and in art practice, a shift to a more conceptual art that denied painting.

Donald Judds essay, Specific Objects 1965, is noteworthy for its claim that the representative art of the modern is now neither painting nor sculpture but the virtual new medium of ‘three-dimensional work’. This work followed by four years Greenbergs landmark collection of essays Art and Culture. In this context the first two claims made by Judd- that the 3D work is neither ‘painting nor sculpture’ and that ‘linear history has unravelled somewhat’- defy both categorical imperatives and historicist tendencies in Greenbergian modernism. ‘Judd takes the putatively Greenbergian call for an objective painting so literally as to exceed painting altogether in the creation of objects. For what can be more objective, more specific, than an object in actual space?’ According to Judd, and also to Joseph Kosuth in Art after Philosophy, (1969), some of the precursors in late-modernist art assumed painting and sculpture to have become set forms. Kosuth suggests that as formalist arts ‘reason to be’ is strictly aesthetic and all that prevents it from being merely an object of decoration is its presentation in terms of an art idea.

The three-dimensional work, Judd claims, isn’t the use of a given form in the reified sense of painting and sculpture. Judd suggests that with the lack of a precedent as to the form of the three-dimensional work means that it can be almost anything (provided of course that it is not painting or sculpture.) ‘Because the nature of three-dimensions isn’t set, given beforehand, something credible can be made, almost anything.’ This expansion opens up criticism too, as Judd is led by his own logic to this infamous avant-gardist position: ‘A work of art needs only to be interesting.’ Here consciously or not, interest is posed against the great Greenbergian shibboleth quality. Whereas quality is judged by the reference to the standards not only of the old masters but also of the great moderns, interest is provoked through the testing of aesthetic categories and the transgressing of set forms. In Specific Objects then the mandate that late-modernist art pursue objectivity is completed only to be exceeded, as Judd and company come out the other side of the objecthood of painting into the realm of objects.

This is one major example of discourse that began a shift from high modernist aesthetics to a more conceptual and politicised art, critical of itself and distancing itself from association with painting. Kosuth in Art after Philosophy states explicitly: ‘Being an artist now means to question the nature of art. If one is questioning the nature of painting, one cannot be questioning the nature of art. If an artist accepts painting (or sculpture) he is accepting the tradition that goes with it. That’s because the word art is general and the word painting is specific. Painting is a kind of art. If you make paintings you are already accepting (not questioning) the nature of art. One is then accepting the nature of art to be the European tradition of a painting-sculpture dichotomy.’

Thomas McEvilley, in his essay Heads it’s Form, Tails it’s not Content, suggests late modernism ‘still has the art body in the last shivers of its fever.’* I too still feel reverberations from this period. I had come to feel (perhaps told to feel) that painting since high modernism exhibited a ‘lack’ of some undefinable description. This was not a grounded feeling, but entailed more than a concern for painting in the digital age. Possibly I had been influenced by art history books that built up the hopes of painting in high modernism, only to read on how their transcendental aspirations later fell short in an almost tragic way. As Judd suggested, ‘The disinterest in painting is a disinterest in doing it again, not in it as it is being done by those who developed the last advanced versions.’ Only a denial of painting could remove oneself from the historicist tendencies of painting that had been somewhat ‘emptied out’ in Formalism. Painting’s histories were one of my ‘problems of paint’. I had felt a burdening association between my contemporary abstraction and high modernism - guilty by a visual association in the medium of painting. I needed to come to recognise that my practice was located away from the universality that was aspired to by both critics and painters in modernism. Time, among other things, had given me a degree of dislocation or breathing space from modernism that I was sure had allowed a reinvestment of what it meant to paint today. In a time where distinctions and hierarchies between mediums have blurred or become irrelevant, I have found solace. Painting is neither superior nor inferior- it remains for me simply a way of working.

Gerhard Richter has become the single most important artist to my practice. More than a mere artist model, I could go as far to say that his attitude towards painting has enabled me to continue to paint purposely. Secondly, his methods of scraping paint on and off the canvas was the catalyst from which I developed my processes. For both these reasons Richter has become a kind of ‘readymade’ for me. I will discuss my work with Richter’s shortly, but first let me continue by expressing how Richter’s approach has affected my perception of the practice of painting.

Richter began painting in the early 1960s under the climate of this anti-painting mood. The themes of his work and his writings range widely over the intrinsic problems of art. He holds central a sceptical view of the influence of any kind of ideology in artistic and intellectual circles. His statement, ‘I believe in nothing’, paradoxically confirms a belief: a free flowing coincidentia oppositorum, or union of opposites, that transcends the opposition between intuition and reason. His work has thus been established as ‘the expression of an attitude’.

Though rarely alluded to in his notes, Richter’s ‘problems of paint‘, do refer not just to his practice now, but to what painting has been. Briony Fer writes of Richter: ‘He approached the problem of painting in ways that rendered a modernist vocabulary inadequate. This is not because that vocabulary was unable to deal with the marks on the surface of his abstract pictures at the level of description, but because it was quite unequipped to contend with their contingencies at the level of meaning…’ Benjamin Buchloh insists on ‘the self-reflexivity of his expressive surface, calling it ‘retrospective’ in the sense that the pictures ‘seem to work through, step by step, strategy by strategy, technique by technique, the past options of abstract painting.’

Richter has become a subject of my practice for, what Buchloh has called, his ‘quixotic decision to identify with the medium of painting itself’ when all around him were abandoning it. My continuing attraction to Richter stems from his own, further developed preoccupation with the problems of painting, that predates mine. In a sense Richter has taught me, and in his writing I have often read my own thoughts. It is thus from his strategy- to continue painting in spite of the climate for painting in the 60s, and at times in spite of himself- that I have felt painting, (and therein my painting) to have been recovered.

I will now move to discuss how Richter’s processes have been absorbed into my practice. I have spoken earlier about the development of my ‘drag’ technique whereby paint is literally dragged by scrapers across the canvas. I have developed this process after witnessing a Gerhard Richter abstract in a book. I found his processes, which are left evident, innovative, unusual and enigmatic. I appreciated his direct relationship with paint (I was already working myself in direct ways), and its difference from the Abstract Expressionists. Slowly I began to incorporate such paint dragging features into my work, however I did this without having any knowledge of how they were done, or without any direct experience of a Richter painting.

I have still never seen a Gerhard Richter painting ‘in the flesh’ and my entire experience of Gerhard Richter is in the realm of the reproduced. This detachment, between my experience of Richter through the reproduced and that of what a real Richter might be, adds an additional dimension to my work. Reproduction of Richter has taken me closer to Richter, though it has also taken me farther away. In my detachment from the real real of Richter, the reproduced image has become my real experience of his work. The consequences of this would be largely immaterial if I had not developed an appropriation of his processes. A detached viewer might consider a Richter reproduction as an ‘example’ of a real Richter. For myself, as my processes shape to appropriate his, a reproduced Richter becomes everything but the real thing. By this detachment from Richter, I have developed my processes that in likeness reflect a reproduced Richter.

Richter has written: ‘One cannot really paint the way I paint because the essential premise is missing: the certainty of what is to be painted, that is to say, the theme…’ It seems however that I really can paint the way Richter paints. I can represent Richter… Or can I? Like him, my practice is driven by concerns of the problems of paint. The theme of what I am painting is lacking too. I have developed my own ways of achieving Richter-like effects. Yet in the way I have come to understand Richter, the statement ‘One cannot really paint the way that I paint’, refers more deeply to his ‘expression of an attitude’ in painting- beyond the consequences of any marks. This attitude is personal. This attitude is Richters.

I can represent by way of analogy a Richter object. If this were my primary goal, or rather, theme, then it would be accurate to suggest that I am a super-realist painting abstract pictures. That I do not should confirm what the viewer should already know. I have developed these techniques en route to forming my own expression, attitude and fate amid the ‘problems of paint’. I do not represent Gerhard Richter; I am not Gerhard Richter.

Peter Weiermair has rightly stated that ‘Richters works are themselves a product of displacement. They are dealing with a psychological content that is other than what they represent. They deny access to the beholder since, in a sense, they conceal what motivated their creation behind the motifs they depict.’ This is a truth in my work also. Does however my use of Richters processes move or extend one step any position which Richter may have reached? Or does my use of Richters processes, so recognisable, add only to an increasing ambiguity for the viewer? The appearance to some viewers that I am painting a Richter is only a mirage. Gerhard Richter has become in my work the equivalent of another line of ‘code’- necessary, but complicating further any underlying meaning.

My association with Richter has begged a question of whether my work is more Richter than Roger. I have answered that if Richters work is ‘an expression of an attitude’, it is his attitude. Comparatively, my attitude to my practice is my own also. As far as the viewer might be concerned the connection between my work and Richter’s relies on appearance. Even this is unstable because the techniques employed in Richter’s Abstraktes Bild series are so varied (as is Richters entire oeuvre) that it is impossible to pin down an archetypical Richter. Still, I do not deny that a comparison can be drawn.

‘By imitation only,’ wrote Joshua Reynolds in 1774, ‘variety, and even originality of invention, is produced.’ More recently art historian Leo Steinberg wrote in 1978, ‘Borrowing images is vital to the abundant spiritual intercourse between artists and art,’ and ‘there is much unpredictable originality in quoting, imitating, transposing, and echoing as there is in inventing.’ A number of artists in the 1980s contended that copying is assimilation, reenactment is appropriation, appropriation is creation. In works more ideologically potent than emotionally moving they alleged that willy-nilly we move within a cosmos of recycled words cysts and images. Slides, video documentaries, art magazines, advertisements, art books- all differently untrue to the hues, textures, and proportions of artistic masterpieces- have conditioned the ideas of these ‘appropriationist’ artists.

This is applicable to my practice in the way in which I have received Richter dislocated in reproduction, and then appropriated his processes, finally making them my own. My work does not however carry with it the irony that can be found in the simulation painters of the 1980s. This ‘simulation painting’, which became known as neo-geo in New York, developed out of appropriation art. It appropriated modernist abstraction in order to mock its aspiration to originality and sublimity, or to play upon its failure. Included in this movement were artists such as Sherrie Levine, Peter Halley, Ashley Bickerton and Ross Bleckner. My work certainly does not carry the same ironic distance from its own tradition of abstract painting nor irony towards Richter. It also does not carry the intent to represent the ‘short-circuit of reality and its reduplication by signs’ that many neo-geo artists sought by signs.

The issues that I have discussed in this essay, have been those most central to my practice. I have never yet felt that in taking painting as a given, or as a found object, it is a limiting factor. Its structure continues to act more as a starting point for my explorations. In the act of painting I do not feel boundaries. For me, painting is many things that words fall short of. In concluding this essay, there should be no any mistake that my practice of painting is without conclusion. Indeed, I feel as though I have only just begun.

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