Work in Progress
Initial/progress sketches
The plan for this painting was to use the orange only as a ground and to make the whole composition dark, with the figures partially being painted over by the dim landscape surrounding them. However, I’m not sure that at this stage that I should work into it anymore.
The overlaying of cartoon imagery (in this case, the figure is that of Kaneda, a character from the 1988 anime ‘Akira’ (1)) over more classically figurative work is something that I’ve been wanting to do for a while now, and I think it works. I was worried about ‘free-hand’ painting a pre-constructed drawing, as inaccuracies are difficult to pull off without looking like a doodle in the back of a schoolbook, but I think it looks ok and the painterly quality works with the exaggerated form of the character.
The overlay of these separate sets of imagery have ended up playing into the idea of romanticising simultaneity and coincidence that has fuelled my other work at the moment. Small aesthetic similarities and happy accidents, for example the white straps of the wrestler figure’s head protection lining up with Kaneda’s hairline; his arm seeming to be a second away from matching that of the wrestler beneath him, were strangely exciting to me when painting this. However, the two images are brought together only by me and each would exist perfectly without being introduced to the other. It was by chance that I took a still from a Youtube video that fitted a still from Akira that I’ve had stored for years yet when combined through the very deliberate act of painting its hard to unlink them. This is at least how I feel about it.
I think that painting gives a kind of meaning to imagery that photography, for example, doesn’t, because every part of it is deliberately constructed. Every element is a choice, every brush mark a decision. Even staged photography, for me, isn’t the same, because a painting takes so much time to build up. It could be changed at any moment in an infinite number of ways before its final form, but it hasn’t been, which I think gives any suggestion of a scene it gives a certain level of merit, even if it’s terrible.
(1) Dir. Atom, K., Akira, Tokyo Movie Shinsha, Japan, 1988