'Out-With'
Selected for 'Living With the Past' at Cupola Contemporary Art, Sheffield 15 July - 27 August
FRIDAY 26 JULY
Today I was able to look at 'Out-With' as a painting and I did get that charge that comes out of the creative process. I entered the studio with a stack of ideas for change but, sat in front of the painting, rejected them one by one: the painting is a statement. The only refinement was to put a veil of stronger yellow just in from the left-edge. We are done.
John Boyne's novel is about friendship in the worst of places. The story is told through the eyes of nine year old Bruno, who gives the name 'Out-With' to the place the family move to from Berlin when his father takes up a new post - as Commandant of Auschwitz. Echoing Anselm's Keifer's paintings of blond-haired Margarete and black-haired Jewish Shulamite - sourced in 'Death Fugue', Holocaust survivor Paul Celan's poem set in a concentration camp - Bruno's and Schmuel's fates are intertwined. In the horror of the final pages there is the balance of the tenderness of the two boys holding hands. In this painting, with the twin canvases, the power of colour and the stark imagery, I've tried to capture that balance between the best and the worst of humanity.
'Margarete' 1991 Anselm Keifer
detail
REFLECTION
'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas'...A difficult subject for a painting, but I hope, like John Boyne's novel, the painting will provoke an emotional response, but also be a reminder of of one of history's darkest episodes.
To answer my question below 'Why am I doing this?', the main motive has been the artistic challenge. I don't do paintings like this: working with colour, 'The Art of the Senses', sourced in the places and books that I enjoy and in the excitement and uncertainties of the painting process. But what I have is a different painting, working out of a different set of emotions.
What is different about this painting is its' visual starkness. The journey across the painting from the yellow of love and warmth and light to the horror in the bottom right corner, reflecting both John Boyne's narrative and the reality of the fates of the millions transported to Auschwitz. The changes I made today makes this journey more graphic and emotional.
On Wednesday, the painting was certainly more 'beautiful' but perhaps an avoidance of the dark context. Today, like Bruno, I entered the camp, the session bringing me closer to the heart of the novel. The painting is powerful but there is guilt enjoying the rhythms of angles and different spaces in the depiction of the long grey buildings. I cannot avoid my role as an artist to create visual interest within the painting.
On a personal level, this painting experience has been cathartic but I am longing now to mix a beautiful blue and spread it across a fresh canvas, the beginning of a new painting in the '20 Books=20 Paintings' series...
studio
THURS 25 JULY
A very difficult session, both technically and emotionally. Why am I doing this?
Bruno's house was introduced and a pattern/repetition of long grey barrack-blocks leading the eye to the black building on the right edge - the only building with a door. I've adapted the blueprint of Auschwitz and changed the orientation of the huts, to continue the key vertical stripe motif. The concrete fence-post now also becomes the the twin rows of electric fence that enclose the camp. It has been a challenge painting the gable ends of the huts without weakening the verticality. The huts towards the right are deliberately less detailed and solid, ending as simple vertical lines. This helps imply the dark grey on the right as a crematorium chimney. The accidental yellow marks on the right could be the two friends. No need to embellish the left-side - it is freedom.
Wednesday
WEDNESDAY 24 JULY
Think on it: mixing beautiful yellows and greys for a painting about Auschwitz...
I may put hinges between the two sides, referencing both the book form and the horror of the closing door in the novel's finale. The hinged 'book' could be secured in a frame, an historical reminder or shown partly open...
Progress today: yellow stripes for the left-side, the colour of sunshine. The yellow accentuates the contrast between inside and outside the fence, an idea supported by the simple duality of the central image. The drawing has been refined, the curves creating a movement from left to right, echoing Bruno's journey. There is just enough space at the bottom of the tree/fence-post for a small boy to crawl under...
There are 'adult' complications and complexities I could introduce. An out of scale Bruno's (Commandant's) House at the base of the tree, positioned, as in reality, by the entrance to the camp, 300 metres from the gas-chambers. On the other side of the fence, an aerial view of the camp, with endless rows of huts and a dark indicator of the gas-chamber in the novel's final pages in the bottom right-corner. And/or the small figure of Schmuel, a concentration of tiny stripes amongst strengthened broader stripes. Another option is to hint at the window through which Bruno and his sister see beyond the garden and into the camp.
Or I can accept the simplicity of the central image as capturing the essence of the novel and work on enhancing the the colour and surface. Already I've been refining the greys and redrawing, seeking some kind of elegance, which feels strange considering the subject-matter, but these are the concerns of an artist. The initial greys were deliberately made from black and white but today saw the introduction of new greys around the fence-post made from Paynes Grey and violet, to compliment the yellows. My wife Denise - who is Jewish - commented that she loves it as a painting but her emotional response was that it didn't capture the bleakness and horror of both the novel and the reality of Auschwitz. This is more than a painting: my mind is made up- I think we are heading to that darkness in the bottom right corner...
Tuesday
TUESDAY 23 JULY 2019
A wonderful, moving story about friendship, the innocence of childhood contrasting with 'civilised' adult values of dogma, duty and destruction. This contrast is the key to this painting. Grisly research: shocking concepts and images revisited, that somehow must be referenced in Schmuel's world on the right side of the painting. During the first session, I came up with the simple, hybrid image of idyllic tree and electrified fence.
The left-side will be beautiful colour, acknowledging Matisse, the antithesis of darkness. There may be further contrasts: luxury train and cattle-truck (with horizontal stripes), the Commandant's house and fetid barrack-block. Today was about grey, stripes formed by dripped-paint and gravity, with vertical brushstrokes through the liquid paint.
The canvas awaits... 70x100cms
I was recently asked to produce a painting, sourced in the novel, for the North Cornwall Book Festival in October. From a list of authors I have chosen John Boyne, and his novel 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas'. This latest project will be an artistic, moral and emotional challenge.
Having neither read the book or seen the film, after hearing a brief summary of the plot, I immediately formed the idea of two worlds, one of colour, the other of black, white and grey, with the canvas divide representing the fence between them, with its imprisoning curved top cutting into the dark.
Choosing this book will mean revisiting horrors from my childhood, too young to see footage from Belsen on All Our Yesterdays. But I read - I had to find out, to understand but then wished I hadn't. I consciously avoided the episode on the Holocaust in The World at War as a teen and did so again on the re-run as an adult.
In advance of last years 'Black & White' workshops, I asked the participating artists to think about what black and white meant to them, symbolically, emotionally, formally. I wrote at the time: 'It’s the palette of the death-camps, chilling selections, black ss uniforms and horrors in a frozen white landscape'. My copy of 'The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas' has been lying around for a while - I've been avoiding it but now is the time to overcome my fears.