A KESTREL FOR A KNAVE
Every artist makes one painting that, whether intended or not (and it’s usually the latter), comes to define their entire aesthetic. For me, it’s this one, painted ten years ago, but still the high bar I try to reach for with every new painting that I start. All my influences are in there, some obvious (Barry Hines, as if that needed pointing out, but also Andrew Wyeth in the colour palette and overall mood) and some more subtle and occulted, which I won’t ruin the mystery of by revealing here. It’s the kind of painting I secretly always wanted to make, even back in the 1990’s when I was fully immersed in comics and pop culture, and it took a long time for me to get to the point to where I could actually do it, but I’m glad I finally did.
I BREAK HORSES
I break horses
Doesn’t take me long
Just a few well-placed words
And their wandering hearts are gone
My 2010 drawing inspired by one of the greatest songs of all time. No hyperbole, just a statement of fact.
THE KINGFISHER
I’ve had fifty five years on this planet and only seen a kingfisher in the wild once, and it was a fleeting sighting at that. I was sat by a river, somewhere in north-west Wales, on a pleasant summer afternoon. No-one else around and no sounds except the river and the birds in the trees that overhung it, casting lustrous green shadows across the water. Suddenly, out of nowhere, came this blue streak, moving at a speed almost too fast to follow, flying straight along the course of the river. I knew it could only have been a kingfisher, and that was confirmed when about five minutes later it came back the other way, moving at the same speed and with the same unwavering sense of purpose. It was what I call a Hughesian moment, the kind of arresting interaction with the wild that Ted Hughes always regarded with a degree of importance, acknowledging that this was evidence of the universe trying to communicate something to us, had we only the sense to understand it.
THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO LOSE
Further to this earlier post, here’s where I’ve got to with the new painting. The underlying pencils are now complete and I can start undercoating, but not before I finish the landscape I’ve been working on for over a year now. I always lack the time to get the work done as quickly as I would like to, and have come to terms with the fact that I can’t work any faster than I do, and have no wish to get all impressionistic so I can plop something out in an afternoon. These paintings take months because they have to and because it’s worth it.
NOW YOU’RE TAKEN
Unhappy perhaps is the man, but happy the artist, who is torn with this desire.
I burn to paint a certain woman who has appeared to me so rarely, and so swiftly fled away, like some beautiful, regrettable thing the traveller must leave behind him in the night. It is already long since I saw her.
She is beautiful, and more than beautiful: she is overpowering. The colour black preponderates in her; all that she inspires is nocturnal and profound.
Her eyes are two caverns where mystery vaguely stirs and gleams; her glance illuminates like a ray of light; it is an explosion in the darkness.
I would compare her to a black sun if one could conceive of a dark star overthrowing light and happiness.
But it is the moon that she makes one dream of most readily; the moon, who has without doubt touched her with her own influence; not the white moon of the idylls, who resembles a cold bride, but the sinister and intoxicating moon suspended in the depths of a stormy night, among the driven clouds; not the discreet peaceful moon who visits the dreams of pure men, but the moon torn from the sky, conquered and revolted, that the witches of Thessaly hardly constrain to dance upon the terrified grass.
Her small brow is the habitation of a tenacious will and the love of prey. And below this inquiet face, whose mobile nostrils breathe in the unknown and the impossible, glitters, with an unspeakable grace, the smile of a large mouth ; white, red, and delicious; a mouth that makes one dream of the miracle of some superb flower unclosing in a volcanic land.
There are women who inspire one with the desire to woo them and win them; but she makes one wish to die slowly beneath her steady gaze.
Charles Baudelaire, ‘The Desire To Paint’
‘Now You’re Taken’ is one of my favourite Mogwai songs, and an obvious one to try and illustrate when I started my series of paintings inspired by their songs in late 2008. Leave it to good old Charlie B to express in his inimitable fashion the urge that drives an artist to paint such a subject.
RUN WITH THE HUNTED (II)
This painting, together with its companion piece, hangs in our hallway. As I write these words, if I turn in my chair I can see it, serving to patiently remind me what I’m here to do, and to reiterate that any entreaties to act otherwise are to be politely but forcefully refused. That’s the part of being an artist that you can’t train for (not that I’ve ever been through any artistic training, something I was antithetical against from a very early age) – the ability to maintain focus on the things that truly inspire you and that urge you to make images in the first place. That’s something you only learn through many years of experience but, along the path of those years, there are so many distractions and diversions that ultimately bleed out all your time and your energy, leaving you spiritually drained and far removed from the haunts of your muse. Only now, five decades into the game, do I finally feel like I have got all that behind me and what lies ahead is a straight and open road, the fabled wild highway down which the poetic soul longs to cruise.
RUN WITH THE HUNTED (I)
This painting, together with it’s companion piece, comes from a period (2012-13) when I was almost exclusively making black & white paintings. Both paintings hang in the hallway of my home.
MR JELLY
…keeps kids quiet.
SCOTLAND’S SHAME
Another painting from my Mogwai series, each one inspired by a song from the band’s extensive back catalogue. As a youth of the 80’s I remember when any kind of flag waving was treated with deep suspicion. All of that changed in the mid-90’s, with Oasis draping their amps with the Union flag, and St George flags hanging out of bedroom windows during Euro ’96. I’ve no opinion on it either way, as to me it’s just a piece of material with a pattern on it.
KARL OVE KNAUSGARD
My 2015 portrait of Karl Ove Knausgård, literary darling of the chattering classes. I read the first of his Min Kampf sequence of autobiographical novels, and could see what he was doing, but could not spare the vast number of hours required to plough through the rest of the books. I prefer to read quoted excerpts and piece together a single slim volume that, for me at least, achieves much the same results. As he himself has written: “Letters are nothing but dead signs, and books are their coffins.”
Some other quotes of his that I like are:
I don’t know what is more frightening: a creature on a small planet worshipping itself and its world as if infinity did not exist, or a creature who burns its fellow beings because the infinite does exist.
Oh, this is the song about being sixteen years old and sitting on a bus and thinking about her, the one, not knowing that things will slowly, slowly, weaken and fade, that life, which is now so vast and so all-embracing, will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity which doesn’t hurt so much, but nor is it as good.
and, my favourite:
I would have loved to buy a hot dog from her, just to watch her squeezing the ketchup and mustard from the plastic bottles over the sausage.
Rik Rawling 