Experimental Painting

Why am I excited about this painting. I don't really know why. Maybe because I can see with a clear conscience its all my own work. It did not have its genesis in any other person's image, its mine, be the final work good or bad. I think thats what made me persist in completing it, I want to expound this image born of a thought, born of my own experience of growing up on a farm.

The piece is called 'Testing Cattle' and no one is going to hang it on their sitting room wall because it goes with the decor..maybe what I'm really saying is that it may not find a buyer in my lifetime, because who would want such a seemingly ugly painting, and there is an ugly side to it.

I'm reminded of Picasso's words, when he said that paintings were not for sitting room walls, but rather they were instrutments of war. War can avail of many different kinds of instrutments and this most definitely is an instrutment of war in my psyche.

I don't mean war in the violent sense of the word, I mean it in the sense that like most things in this world, painting is a big business, there is a whole world of books produced each year to tell eager buyers, how to compose a painting, and how to mix your colours and what subjects should be painted in what light conditions and so on infinitium. I was one of those eager buyers and the writers of such books were for the most part genuine, fulfiling a genuine need, but I think at the end of the day, and they would probably agree with me, you have to look in at your life experience and paint from that place, if your going to produce work of any lasting value. Rant over.

I give you 'Testing Cattle'. Make of it what you will. I'm happy with it, happy being a many sided word.

Click on the image below to a larger version of the painting..

March 2009 This painting was painted over in a fit of frustration - see reworking