A  show at the Espacio gallery in Shoreditch from the group I have been a part of for the last two years has just ended. It’s a been an interesting and busy few weeks – first leading up to the exhibition, choosing potential exhibits, framing paintings (pleased to say I did my own frames for the first time) and packaging prints.

Transportation to the gallery posed issues as some of my painting were too big to go in the back of the Volvo estate, but luckily they survived the journey on the roof rack.  Then the curators, Chris Hough and Tony Hull, selected the works and positioning, inevitably leaving to some disappointment as there was not space for everything.

Overall the show looked good and displayed the variety and high quality of the works produced (which was not just my opinion but that of many visitors).  As my main paintings were large (1.5 metres square) I only had space for one painting (see top), and a selection of prints in the browser, one of which sold – see below.

It has also made me think more about what art is for and why we do it.  The packaging and pricing of the artworks brings to the forefront the commercial and financial aspect of art, which is particularly prominent in commissioned work (which historically was typically the way it worked).

So is art just a way of making money, or is it a primal creative impulse to express, a cultural symbol or activity, a decorative hobby, a skilled craft, an intellectual exercise, a message to the world, or a route to fame and favour?  These issues have been discussed in writing on the history and theory of art, including some of the finest minds from Plato to Marx and Freud and beyond.

In all truth its a mix of all these factors, in varying proportions according to circumstances such as the prevalent culture at the time. Art obviously cannot be divorced from money – after all it governs who can afford to make art, although most will agree that currently unless you’re one of the fortunate few it’s not the best way of making money.

Following on from the “Talking Heads” painting as discussed in my previous post, I began to see the potential of a method of continually ‘blowing up’ parts of an image to create new images. As mentioned, there is the resonance with the theme of war and conflict on which the original image was based in the term ‘blow up’.

But there is a broader context in that the image is one of many, recording a single instance in a long running and widespread conflict affecting millions of different lives. Even within that single image there are many versions of events which can be told – the stories of the survivors, those who have died, or those that have lost others, the rescuers, those launching the missiles, and the politicians and military leaders.

Add to this that there are also those who espouse views which are false, either deliberately to feed an agenda, or maybe self protection/preservation, or a merely misreading or misremembering of the situation.

We have all these potential stories for each image, and these are now spread far and wide through social media and 24 hour TV coverage.  And there are millions of images from which one can choose and comment upon.

Blowing up an image to highlight and reinterpret a section of the image allows us to create a new story, which will have a different meaning than the original image.   Each blown up image maybe reminiscent of some thing or things, a person or people, buildings, a landscape, although originally it would have shown something completely different, such as rubble created by the explosion.

The idea of blowing up the initial image to create new images is a metaphor for how many layers of meaning and interpretations each image may convey, depending on the point of view taken.  And this process can be repeated continuously allowing many different narratives to be created, so that the original aspect and meaning of the image can become lost altogether, and you are looking at something which is in effect divorced from any reality, yet may hint at an alternative world.

As an example, if we look at the picture I call Pig and Snake, below on the left, this was taken by doing a crop and blow up of the Talking Heads image on the right.

Pig and Snake (2017)

Talking Heads (2017)

In fact, Pig and Snake is more or less an inverted and mirrored version of the bottom half of Talking Heads.  Yet the pictures look fairly different, and I think few would realise the connection unaided even though the colouring and some elements are similar.

In truth to derive the development of the new image went through a few stages, such as changing the aspect ratio and emphasising certain features to obtain the desired effect, which was to create a new picture with a different subject.

But this is also true of news and stories  – some people will see an event in a totally different light than another, particularly if they have heard about it through intermediate sources, each with their own interpretation and agenda. Now

It is in this way we can create ‘Fake Art’.  This mimics the #Fake tag used commonly, and often incorrectly, to label anything which people find contrary to their world view. In fact ‘Fake Art’ uses the term correctly as the aim is to deliberately produce something which is not as it seems.

I started to look at a number of works I created at various times to see if I could discern a pattern, starting with my most recent work.  It’s difficult to understand the creative process, but maybe just describing it may help.

My latest paintings have been a series of ever increasing blow ups of a study I made.

The study was in turn one of a series of works I made as part of a project depicting the bombing and subsequent destruction of cities and towns in the Middle East arising from the conflicts in Syria and the Yemen.

I chose this original picture from many posted on the internet because it dramatically portrayed the scale of the destruction and resilience of the population in the face of it, which was the theme of my project.  I guess this was also the motivation behind the photograph itself, although there may have been other deeper factors such as commercialism or propaganda.

The idea for the blow up came just by noticing an interesting structure of some of the damaged buildings in the corner of the picture. (If the term ‘blow up’ and its relation to the subject of study it was based on had any influence initially it was on a subconscious level, although the connection did become clear to me later.)

The structure vaguely resembled two heads, which probably helped me to notice it.  The ability of our minds to see fairly abstract shapes and interpret them as something else is primeval, particularly where they relate to humans and animals.

I cropped and blew up this portion of the image in Photoshop, changed the aspect ratio to a square format, and so produced the image template.  I then initially painted a study of this freehand predominantly in black and white using charcoal and oil paint.  I then redid the image using projection on to canvas.  Although originally in black and white I added subdued colours.  I made slight amendments to the images to subtly accentuate the likeness of the two abstract forms to suggest representations of heads.

The interest in the image is because we can relate to the shapes, even if we do not immediately recognise them as heads (which they aren’t anyway). Our need to see sense and structure in abstract forms gives the image meaning, and the ambiguity of abstraction versus representation makes it a puzzle to be deciphered.