221. Florian
221. Florian, 2025, oil on linen, 40 x 30cm, (Darryn Ansted)
I have been enjoying walking our toddler in the morning and going into the studio in the afternoon. I don’t think painting is enjoyable in the same way as walking. In fact, I find it can be exhausting because I am always trying to make the marks carry some breath or character so that besides the registration of a shape they might also have something of the sculptural, capricious or unforeseen variety. ‘Accident is always the best artist’ they say, and that is why for many years your rags usually look more interesting than your paintings. And thus here is basically a series of accidents in a very confined space. Conscious accidents?
On my walks, I have been persisting with the second and now third volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s epic piece of autofiction. It is indeed strange to read a book so extreme in its details. In terms of fiction it reminds me a bit of Victor Hugo. In my opinion, as with Les Misérables, the book could also benefit from some editing down. While some tracts of the text are wonderful, wandering and rich, other tracts do tend to wander into the unduly neurotic direction, like when he explains feeling annoyed that his wife pushed the pram with only one hand. As I was listening to this as an audiobook, I too was pushing the pram at times with only one hand. I think the extremely long digressions, which aren’t without their charm, could have been shortened in places by using a more symbolic element. However, I concede that that is probably against the spirit of the book, which I think very deliberately sets out to be a telephone book of experiences. Much of the content of the book resonated with me, particularly when he discusses moving countries around age 40, having kids and trying to write around the allotted time for child-minding. Stories, narratives and fictional worlds indeed seem to be freshly animated when you have a little person to entertain. When I look over this series of paintings, I haven’t intended them to be about this ‘mythopoesis’ but many are faces looking at children, or in this case, looking at another kind of imaginative creation.
Every painting presents me with a riddle. For this painting I wrestled with the shirt a lot. It was such an unusual, ambient brown. I thought Raw Umber approximated the color pretty well but it tended too much in the green direction. I went through many colors and many mixtures of colors to get that peculiar waffle-sand colorway glowing properly beneath the bleaching halogen lights coming from multiple directions. Only after the apron felt sufficiently held in place around the neck and pulled downward over the nicely disheveled collar, did it get there in the end.
