PLF 27 Painting

Jonathan Lane works on his own In different times, such a statement about an artist, about the way and the why artworks are made, would have sounded obvious, and therefore quite meaningless. Most artists whose names figure prominently in the pages of history books, those who give meaning to what museums collect and conserve, are often thought to have been lone gunmen. And perhaps some of them were. Pierre-Nicolas Bounakoff, 2022 ____________________________ I have been exploring the properties of lining paper with a release agent (created for industrial printing) when used as a support for acrylic paint since summer 2020. The behaviour of the paper and paint is critical to my philosophy and approach. I use brushes to apply liquid paint to the surface, but the way paint responds to it distorts and erases the trace of a brush mark, which is as impermanent as the surface is hostile. I also make marks with the sticks and branches that I have in the studio, which are ever present and at the heart of my work. The paintwork can be modified until it stops drying and can be removed once dry. Once a painting is finished, I transfer the dry paint from the original paper to a new surface using a binding agent, sandwiching it all together overnight (the first paper releases the paint); so the painting undergoes a material transformation to become a finished artwork; the viewer is looking at the mirror image of what I painted. This manipulation is critical to this second phase of what I call the ‘Plastic Forest’ project – in the first phase, finished towards the end of 2021, I cut the paintings into pieces to physically block chain them and created unique, digital prints of exact tone and scale to become their record. Before Covid my work had a different trajectory. The trauma that gripped us all in the early months of 2020 generated within me a new urgency and resolve; there was defiance in my response to the suffering.