220. Teresa
220. Teresa, 2025, oil on linen, 40 x 30cm, (Darryn Ansted)
I recently suggested that a painting is like a knot and that this blog would be the place where I would start to disentangle it, in language, for those interested in knowing more about my work. The painting I am uploading today is number 220 and is called ‘Teresa’. I have been here in Germany for over four years now. My work is following some good routines, and some predictable tendencies should be visible, particularly in the palette and application of paint. However, there were a couple of new tests for me in this painting, and a new riddle to solve, as it were, which I will attempt to explain here.
First some background. My current project is called ‘Situations’ and is a process of painting from photographs of recent situations I experienced. I have also been doing projects that involve my community here in Geseke, its people’s hands, their possessions, and now their expressions. A lot of this runs counter to the direction of contemporary art, which, after making it for a long time, I have found tends to feel a bit like I am sawing off the tree branch upon which I am sitting. There is nothing particularly ‘deep’ to proclaim about this kind of project. However, it is also not arbitrary. I have been painting ‘from life’ for a few years and this project involves leaning instead on photographs. This reliance on the photograph allows me to paint more spontaneous moments. (I also noticed about myself as a painter that I thrive from having ‘a project’. If I paint aimlessly and only inwardly-focused it provides space for development but it tends to also make the work a little hard to read. When I undertake a painting project like this I benefit from its rules, the structure, the routines and the resulting work becomes far more readable to the audience, less insulated.) I usually avoid painting from photographs in order to avoid ‘coloring in’ so here I am painting from photographs but with the intention of retaining some of the potential of oil paint: emotion, originality, vulnerability, experimentation and so on, should all be opened by the painting process.
The first thread now disentangled, in this particular painting the subject is a friend who joined us for a birthday party. There is a whole architecture involved in the painting of laughter. Ironically, it is quite grueling to paint. I was certainly not laughing during my long sessions of painting this. This was the riddle of this painting: how to build this structure. It is also an expression that is generally exiled from the museums of contemporary art. Or, if we see laughter there, it is the artist laughing at us—whether it is Manzoni selling his cans in the 1960s or some enfant terrible taping a banana to a wall. The joke is on us in the contemporary art Biennale, or perhaps my sense of humor is not sufficiently developed. I enjoy very simple jokes. When our infant runs away while I am trying to dress her I could just about cry with frustration but fortunately laughter comes out instead. It is not rare to see a laugh in an art gallery because it is out of fashion but also I think because it is just so tricky to paint. At the core of this painting was the riddle of how to paint the human tongue! I have never painted it before. And when I realize this, I can start to understand the painting of a cow’s tongue by Israel Hershberg in a new light. That is a painting of only a tongue!
Besides my world and the art world, perhaps the bigger world at large might form another thread in this painting-knot. I can’t say it with certainty. Or rather, it must form part of it but I am probably unable to grasp it from my first-person perspective. I recently saw a lot of excitement about AI and simultaneously massive erosion of civil society. The relay between subjective experience and objective reality is the axis on which I situate painting normally. Now that axis seems to be extremely curly. I guess we can laugh.
