After reading the catalogue of ‘Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World’, I started to think of my paintings of as an adventure of the world, responding to the discovery and exploration of the English nature, or a new living environment during my study aboard.
Here is the excerpt from George Shaw talking about the curating of “Graham Sutherland: An Unfinished World”.
“In any case, the painter is a kind of blotting paper: he soaks up impressions. He goes through ‘periods of fullness and evacuation’ as Picasso has said, and is very much part of the world. The painter cannot therefore avoid soaking up the implications of the outer chaos of twentieth-century civilisation. By that token, tragic pictures will be painted – subconsciously perhaps – and without necessarily having a tragic subject. Picasso himself during the war painted tragic ‘still lives’; maybe one can only ‘mutter in darkness – spirit sore.’ But one has in one’s hand the instruments of transformation and redemption.”
“Albert Camus wrote that a man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened. Here we see Sutherland unable and unwilling to free himself from the roots that clutch.”
I think painting is a journey for the painter to discover himself, including the dark side (which Carl Jung will call it the ‘shadow’) he try to abandon. It is unavoidable for the artist to project himself onto the work he made. I think my paintings will eventually linked back to my condition of hair pulling somehow later, but at this point i am still trying to figure out where it leads me to. I am also trying not only focus on the deformed wood but also taking the landscape in account to construct a stronger setting to support and narrate. I also changed the environment of the tree photos I took. For example in ‘Crocodile’ I paint water to support the assemble of the wood and the aquatic beast.
A Very Sirius Archive 