EXPANDING PAINTING.
Painting is not; ‘doing the right thing’.
Painting is not; designed to impress.
Painting is not; his or hers.
‘Painting is; a breath on a mirror, a footprint, grease on a towel, blood on a stone, damp wallpaper, torn advertising, meaningless graffiti, melting snow, dead leaves, weathered paint, broken windows, neglected gardens, a cry, a smile, a scream, defacement on defacement.’ John Hoyland.
Now. Stuff. Stacked / Leaning.
The ‘Bundles / Fasces / Staves’ undone. Free from restraint.
Unshackled from heavy metaphor.
Individual VS ‘the group’. The ‘groop’. An unruly mob…
A ‘Broken Frame’. My monument, it fell down…
Paired back. Will it / Can it / Should it go further?
A set of questions. Zero attempts at making a ‘picture’.
Not pictures. Not illustrations.
“Tell me about your Paintings, Stephen”.
“They are nothing and everything all at the same time”.
Perhaps they are a forest? A city skyline? A fence / barrier?
“Everything has possibilities and potential.
His palette is the myriad of acquired ephemera in which there is no hierarchy.
Elegant frames sit alongside plastic cable, the King and the Pawn kept in the same box”.
Sean Williams - Extract from essay for Geometry & Gesture 2022.
Painting is dead. Long live Painting.
Painting can ‘fuck right off’. All hail Painting the ‘King of Art’.
Oh Painting you are so old and tired.
Hey Painting, this is fun and new and funky and all that.
On repeat. A locked groove.
The fable of ‘The Baby and the Bath water’.
The baby is bruised and upset. The bathroom is soaking wet.
The mirror is steamed up. The soap is impregnated with hairs…
I am not really a painter am I…
Increasingly I have real problems with that classification, In terms of what I do, at least.
It’s almost like imposter syndrome.
I think the term ‘painter’ suits others very well. Perhaps.
I often feel like the emperor in his ‘new clothes’…
I’m not being ‘a dick’ when I say ‘you have to have to have balls (metaphorically of course!) to make stuff like this’. Most people out there will just ‘laugh their heads off’ at it, or say ‘it’s a pile of shit’ or ‘modern art is rubbish’ or ‘HOW MUCH! do you sell that for’ or ‘my little brother could do better than that in his sleep’, etc…
I keep thinking about Teufelsberg. In Berlin.
(The Devils Mountain).
A mountain that consists of the broken fragments of a city obliterated. Things ‘atomised’. Separated out. Original meaning or use long forgotten… And archeological finds.
Displayed pragmatically in ordered rows in display cases, on shelves. Fragments. Tools? Weapons? Kitchen utensils? Hieroglyphs? Codes? Toys? Jewellery?
Religious symbols or relics?
I know I know, is it all enough?
“Where is the skill?” you ask… “Where is the picture?”
Do I owe ‘the audience’ more than this?
What more do they want! This is alchemy!
“It is neither Art for Art, nor Art against Art.
I am for Art, but for Art that has nothing to do with Art.
Art has everything to do with life, but it has nothing to do with Art”. Robert Rauschenberg.
The studio has a laboratory ‘vibe’ about it.
Purposeful experimentation.
I have a kinda ‘year zero’ head space.
And then Dada pops up;
“Dada alone does not smell: it is nothing, nothing, nothing.
It is like your hopes: nothing.
Like your paradise: nothing.
Like your idols: Nothing.
Like your politicians: Nothing.
Like your heroes: Nothing.
Like your artists: Nothing.
Like your religions: Nothing”.
Manifeste Cannibale Dada 1920. Francis Picabia.
Fundamentally I’m;
1. Lost, without a clue about what this work is supposed to be.
2. Playing.
3. (Knowing wink) Fully aware that this is ‘something else’.
“My weakness, my vanishing eyesight, it means I stumble over letters as I read. I read pages I’ve read so many times before, but they’re different now. I get things wrong, as I read, and in those mistakes, sometimes, I find incredible things that are right”.
A General Theory of Oblivion. Jose Eduardo Agualusa.
Drum sticks in my hands and my ‘Vic Firth’ practise pad is out!
Tapping out some (awful) paradiddles. My timing is a tad rusty…
Thinking about inherent rhythm. Cicadian.
Day to day. Walking / cycling. Building and breaking.
Thinking doing resting.
Sitting in a warm pool of sun flooding through the studio window.
Radio on in the back ground. Indistinct noise filters through from outside / adjoining buildings.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap.
RLRRLRLL RLRRLRLL RLRRLRLL RLRRLRLL
Fetish objects? First Aid Kit?
Miro’s kids ‘messin about’ in the studio?
The ghosts of Tapies, Schwitters and Thubron… those buggers are always hanging around!
“When the discipline of painting was finally challenged by mechanical and digital forces over the last 150 years, it was at first as cumbersome as a blunderbuss or a steam engine. However, now that the callipers and prosthetics have been thrown off, painting literally flies into the air. It navigates by line of flight towards true north, the outermost boundary of its own expanded field”. Expanded Painting - Mark Titmarsh.
Binding Wrapping, Layering, Stacking, Leaning, Piling, Hanging, Draping, Propping, Hooking, Spreading…
“They have a dusty found feel to them. Like objects discovered years later in an old house. Cobwebs and layers of dust. Happened across by accident, no clear idea of what they have been or meant to be or used for previously”.
Shared correspondance - Kate Jacob.
Hanging by a thread… or a piece of elastic, ribbon, bent wire.
Tightly bound, wrapped, piled up, bashed together.
‘Expanding’ the idea of painting.
Found elements and materials. ‘Readymades’ perhaps.
The ‘terms and conditions’ © are locked up in the process / materials / studio.
Cave / Church / Easel / Readymade and beyond.
Legacy? Lineage?
“The readymade is not a painting because there is nothing of painting in it, no paint, no canvas, image, surface or frame. Yet the readymade might also have been a painting, a possible painting, since it was conceived by a painter in the context of avant-garde painting, as a way of saying something about painting. Thus the readymade is an impossible painting that opens up for discussion the very possibility of what painting can be”. Expanded Painting - Mark Titmarsh.
So I continue to ‘break and make’.
Twist, fold, roll, saw, bend, slice… Thinking / not thinking.
Doing / not doing.
‘Ain’t they lovely things’.
‘No, they are shit’.
(Sorry, a private joke with myself. Everyone else has left the studio)…
‘Studio ghosts: When you’re in the studio painting, there are a lot of people in there with you - your teachers, friends, painters from history, critics… and one by one if you’re really painting, they walk out. And if you’re really painting YOU walk out”.
Phillip Guston.
Intricate wonders? A collection of assembled detritus? Kurt Schwitters meets Joseph Cornell in a ‘post expanded painting’ car boot sale being run by Harry Thubron and John Latham.
“To consume only is dangerous, it gives us a taste for the futile. We should participate fully in the cycle of creation, use, reuse and sublimation”. Vega Brennan @vegambrennan
I’ve been working in this very deconstructed fashion for some time now. But, over the past few months some things have changed. A paradigm shift really.
When I used to say I used ‘poor materials’ in my work (Arte Povera) I think now this is truly happening.
When I used to question ‘what the hell were these things’ I now understand that they are in an ‘expanded (expanding) field’ of reference.
And when I used to have grave doubts about wether or not I was a painter and could these possibly be sculptures… That has ceased to be an issue.
“Van Gogh did some eyeball pleasers.
He must have been a pencil squeezer.
He didn’t do the Mona Lisa.
That was an Italian Geezer”.
There ain’t have been some clever bastards - Ian Dury and the Blockheads.
Reflecting on studio practise - Stephen Carley. January 2026.