Amid the frivolity and ubiquity of painting today we can sometimes forget how weird it is. By ‘painting’, I mean the doing of it in those small scruffy rooms, as well as the dizzying array of polychromed objects which hang on the walls of larger, cleaner rooms. Painting has preoccupied all cultures at all times, and while it may from time-to-time and from place-to-place have had a use-value or a function, those values are inconstant, they shift and have been re-invented continually. Part of painting’s weirdness is the fact that we still do it, and that we look at it, and that we care about it. It could be argued that in our present moment in the affluent West, the role and purpose of painting is undergoing another of its transformative mutations. Until recently painting seemed to have become annexed to (i) the engines and institutions advancing social change, (ii) the marketplace of commerce and investment, (iii) the wellbeing industry. None of these frameworks can sustain a long working relationship with painting however, because of their each being at odds – ideologically – with one another, and because of their mutual need to suppress painting’s inherent awkwardness so that it might become controllable and measurable; efficient and effective. What better time then, to consider painting as a weird thing, an unruly thing, and a persistent thing. A simple technology of coloured muds and brushes which refuses to be static, pliable or knowable.

 

‘Some notes on…’ is an occasional series of projects which attempt to look closely at some of the fundamentals of painting – those things we assume to know and to be sensitive to, but, through over-familiarity, passivity, or fear, we can tend to side-line in our rush to extract the shallowest signification of narrative or stylistic ‘meaning’. ‘A feather from a jay’s wing’ is concerned with colour – specifically the inherent complication that comes when paint (pigmented colour) is used to conjure, or project, or surrogate for, other kinds of colour in the natural world, or in our psychological lives.

 

The structure of the feather of a jay’s wing causes only certain light wave frequencies to reflect in phase such that brilliant blues are perceived where the feather itself has no such local colour. Likewise blue eyes have no blue pigmentation, rather a genetic mutation resulting in a lack of melanin within the iris forms a structure which bounces back the shorter light wave frequencies. Winifred Nicholson wrote about (and more importantly attempted to find a way of painting...) the enigmatic wonder of structural colour as seen through prisms, in mother-of-pearl shells and in water ripples. Her focus is fascinating. Those perceived colours are not actually present in those objects, but only made visible because of the way light is reflected or refracted through the structure of their surfaces.

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Similarly, colour charges forms and spaces with emotive or psychic significance (not that this can be readily or universally communicated, or exchanged, but...) which opens-up the possibility of a painting to speak into different, synchronous, ways of inhabiting the world.

Paint-colour too can become a skin over a thing, something which through its application covers over, not just its substrate, but significantly, each of those colour-touches previously applied. This covering-over is not a denial of the thing beneath (or within) however, somehow, painting is able to reassert the object presence (and other attendant qualities) of the thing within vis-à-vis the minute portion of the universe which immediately surrounds it. Again, Nicholson wrote: ‘... colour is not just a coat over objects – it lies on the rim of objects between one form and a neighbour form or space.’ As such, colour becomes an infra-thin. As Duchamp has it: ‘Infra-thin is when the tobacco smoke also smells of the mouth, which exhales it.’

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All painting is in some way involved in taking experiences of the world, translating, and transforming them, such that they become differently constituted, and then feeding those improvisations and inventions back into the world. Something of this disruptive and counter-intuitive engagement with the archaic and idiosyncratic processes of painting in order to enrich the commonplace, debunk the rational, and speculate about the unknowable, is found synecdochally in the ways that the painters in this exhibition employ one kind of colour to conjure or consider another.

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The Eurasian jay is a member of the corvid family, most of which are pure black birds. Within this family, the jay is like the painter for whom the mystery and possibility of colour remains vital to their way of working.

 

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This exhibition would not have been possible without the generous support of private collections in Edinburgh and London. Further thanks to Open Eye Gallery, Edinburgh and Alison Harper at ESoP.

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Text and images relating to Some notes on Looking [Paul Becker, Kofi Boamah, Sophie von Hellermann, Timothy Hyman, Gregory Smart) can be found here.