Marc Blake. Clearing (2016-17) Acrylic on board. 150 x 120cm
This work went though half a dozen or more radically different stages. It began in 2016 as an all over landscape based upon aspects of my local environment in terms of paintings I did from 2007 – 2012. It was then almost totally sanded away, left as is, restarted in a different way, sanded, left out in my carport for a few months, started again, abandoned outside again and then about a month ago, finally brought back in to the studio once more.
At that point the work was mainly just a light pinkish colour, with large lupin flowers in the bottom third. I covered over the entire work freely and without consideration using a variety of colour and paint, before finally deciding to sand it back once again.
The result is a work, which to me at least, is a kind of combination between two American painters who influenced me in different ways at the very beginning of when I started to paint; Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning.
Faint ghosts of the lupin flowers from the earlier iteration can still be seen in the work and with them, what also appears to be fragments of hundreds of other images. Yet aside from the remnants of those flowers, there is not a single representational image in this work that was directly painted. Through controlling the sanding process as much as I am able to, as well as allowing multiple accidents or unexpected results to happen, the resulting surface contains an almost infinite amount of detail. Within this detail , the viewer is free to imagine images as they “see” them, much as is the case with the rhythmic forms in Pollock’s “Mural” (1943), and in a different way, the representational elements in many of de Kooning’s works from the 1950s.
Like those artists, I applied many, many layers of paint in this work, however, it was in the subsequent varying degrees of removing the majority of this pigment and undoing the brushstroke, that the true nature of what I am trying to do, is able to emerge.
marc blake 