Unfinished Painting

“The internal Vision (an essential element of our intimate) is warehoused in the memory and becomes the vision in thought only when recollection seizes It.” – Julia Kristeva   The portrait in my more recent work has become a more stylised representation of a vanity mirror. Creating the connection between the mirror instead of an actual portrait allows the discussion of the viewer looking inside oneself but also looking out at you. You are in the same instance within the painting, but also outside of it. I’m trying to push the painting so that I have to question whether it’s even a portrait anymore. I plan the outline of the face and then it becomes irrelevant, the hair is important but the excess and the swirls even turn into clouds, to baroque decoration, no longer representing hair. I’m starting to learn that the work is becoming more about my love of paint, than the portrait itself. I want to paint something beautiful but also abhorrent. Something you want to touch but also don’t want to look at. This ambivalence goes to the heart of Bhaktin’s fascination with Rabelais’ carnival.   The melting and dripping paint creates an element of losing one’s mask; “letting the mask slip”. The everyday face that one wears to hide their true feelings. It not only shows the mask slipping but also becomes a mask of its own creation. Showing that one is never truly one self in front of others. The creation of ‘self’ relates to many factors. “One(women) must consider both how they want to be seen and how one thinks they will be seen. “She becomes both the surveyed and the surveyor” – John Berger