Swallow Me Don't Follow Me Painting

rubber-modified bitumen, oil, acrylic on paper mounted on canvas ‘Bitumen, Gold, Opium & Crows’, 2011, WTF Gallery, Bangkok, Thailand Solo exhibition of paintings by Justin Mills inspired by the music and lyrics of Tom Waits ‘To me, paintings are not silent and music is not invisible, so painting is just as much about listening as it is about seeing. I’m doing something that I feel is still valid and viable, I’m making images that I’ve never seen before, paintings with a quiet intensity, as compelling and enduring for me as a good Tom Waits track, with an effect that is permanently instantaneous. I like images that baffle me, that make me feel compelled to look at them again and again, things capable of many reinterpretations. Within the working process I have a preference for open simplicity and spontaneity, and a will to try new things. This enables me to rehearse attitudes towards everything that matters in the rest of my life, everything I encounter in this vast, mysterious, crazy, world.’ - Justin Mills ‘After exhibiting his 48 Portraits Of God last year, Mills has produced a new series of paintings inspired by the music and lyrics of American singer-songwriter Tom Waits, the man who once said that ‘there ain’t no devil, there’s just God when he’s drunk’. Mills is still intrigued by the highly-charged symbolic materials of earthy bitumen and ethereal gold but he now makes the rhythms and rhymes of the lexicon, the darkness and the light, an integral part of the ‘visual’, significantly transforming the spatial nature of visual art into something markedly temporal. The iambic beat of the exhibition title subtly suggests an interplay between rich layers and juxtapositions of opposites; rubber-modified bitumen and spirit-based gold paint are thrown together with coloured acrylics to render mesmerising effects of appearing/disappearing, invading/dissolving, solace/menace all of which are echoed in the uniquely visceral and lung-crunching voice of Tom Waits whose music gets played more than anything else in Mills’ studio. His subtle intertextuality and mimicry, engaging himself in a complex and time-consuming creative process of drawing, photographing, and computer-editing, and an integral approach to style, sources and subject matter, results in a unique, innovative rendition of beguiling, multi-layered surfaces and enigmatic images, that makes it difficult to dissociate him from the current renewal and vigour of contemporary painting.’ - Rathsaran Sireekan