So I have to admit, it is hard.
Before, I wrote about going into the studio with my little baby and continuing my practice as usual. The truth is that it is not that easy. For each hour I spend making art, there is two spent burping, feeding, rocking and tending.
It has changed how I make. I am much more considered. I have to contemplate the strokes, the images, and the daubs of paint a lot more before I commit. I am painting in my head a lot more than on canvas.
I am not sure that this is necessarily a bad thing.
For the past few days I have become obsessed with an old image. A little embarrassingly, it is floating around the foot well of my car. I look at it each time I lift Winston in and out. It is an old print out on copy paper of the self portraits that I did when I was pregnant. A little water dropped on it and has seeped through to the back. The water has carried the ink through the paper and so on the back side is the spill mark that is an image of my face.
(I hung it in the latest Cannibal Flower show. I am not sure that they saw the same interest in it as I do)
I want to recreate the spill mark on the backside in the wine paintings that I am doing.
It is a bit of a departure from how I normally render images. In the past in work such as The Language of Long Lingering Looks I render drawings by sketching, drawing attention to line and interpretation of body language. To recreate the watered image on the backside of my self portrait is to render an image in a very different way.
To recreate this effect, it is important that the image is graphic. Not an interpretation of the person but a rendering of a face. I think that this will work best as a daub or single puddle rather than lines. To achieve this I am going to reduce the image digitally and work analogy, transcribing my chosen images rather than interpretation and drawing the image.
I am a little hesitant about work this way as I have a bit of snobbery to this image making process. I like the intellect of line drawings. Sketching images is interpreting what you are seeing rather than simply rendering what you see in the most 'correct' or 'photographic' way.
But the rendering technique is more suited to the idea of these wine paintings; the relic motif, referencing used coasters and Rorschach's ink blotch tests. Plus I feel like this is a more contemporary art practice as it uses photographic images and computer manipulation to achieve the effect.
I don't know, maybe it will work. Maybe it will result in images that I am happy with, maybe not. But I am interested in the investigation and I feel freed from the constraints of trying to produce commodity art.