| country roads |
love and loss referential- a visual mirror to old blues and ballads , folk songs there are no new emotions ancient as i lay dying- faulkner blues, ballads, folk songs gothic undeviating colours black-raw canvas southern gothic romanticism-dark Driven by emotions and imagination rather than science and rationality freedom/dependence romantic being alone but need others to be a realist
I was making paintings really sporadically at this time, not feeling like anything was really right or holding me. Apart from one piece that I began back when I lived at home. It was a painting made from a still of some footage that I took on a walk with my sister, a grey and rainy day, we walked the dog up the road and stopped to see the horses. I took a video on a digital camera of them, their hair long and sodden, i stilled on a forest of strong legs. It was unclear whose legs were whose, where tail or torso began, and I liked this ambiguity. I tried a new technique of sketching on stretched cotton with charcoal, before really saturating the cotton with rabbit skin glue. It created a hazy and gothic image that really felt right to me. That first version of 'country goth' was made in November 2024, with which I messed around with and screwed up. Moved out that winter and remade that painting to a standard I was pretty happy with, but every attempt to build on this body of work failed. I found Faulkner's 'as i lay dying' through skimming the southern gothic wikipedia page on literature, realising I recognised the cover as one I liked, I bought it secondhand. The book tells the event of addie bundren's death through the point of view of her family. It's quite uncomfortable, it stresses intensely each of their desires, fears and hang ups. They repeat themselves innumerably and speak on top of each other. The particular scene that informed my work was in which addie has resigned herself to her death bed, and watches out the window as her son builds her coffin for her inevitable death. I thought this scene recalled my previous works with themes of withdrawing psychologically, resigning yourself to bed and apathy. Symbolism of the bed and horses began to flow...
