The Self-Isolation Residency 29th may 2020: Day 61

Exploring Installation No. 8.3: 'Composition in White (Painting)',
501 Artist Residency, China 2011, Antony Clarkson

What is canvas, what is paint? I closed yesterdays post be referencing another of my situation-specific installations; ‘Tension’. In doing so I made comparisons between it and ‘Composition in White (Painting), even though Tension not only involves no paint, but it also involves no canvas. So is Tension a painting, is that what I’m trying to say here? No of course it isn’t, the closest it could be considered is an ‘object’, historically something it is neither one thing nor the other, not painting, not sculpture. This however is not what interests me most about the piece and its references to both ‘Composition in White (Painting)’ and also my spatial paintings. I’m less interested in exploring the differences in these pieces and more interested in exploring the similarities.

I say this because as I use this platform to explore my work further, I find that I am gaining a greater and greater opportunity to both analyses and perhaps even understand both my own work and my motives in making it. I set out on my career as a painter with no intention of deviating from that course. I knew that I was more than capable of making significant sculptural and installation pieces it was just that I wasn’t interested in doing so. However, as I now reflect upon my career more and more, I begin to realise that I was perhaps less concerned with the idea of making paintings and more concerned with the idea of just making. The really fascinating part of this process for me is how installation pieces like ‘Composition in White (Painting)’ and ‘Tension’ grew to be something very different although they still have their roots firmly planted in the history of painting as I noted yesterday. It is almost as though there was a subconscious need in me to explore more that mere painting would allow.
 
 And so it seems inevitable that I would find my way into this larger field of practice through the one that I already knew the most, that painting should be my key to sculpture and installation seems now both poetic and rational at the same time. Perhaps my spatial painting 'Waterfall' helps to illustrate how this move happened in the end.