PAINTING 2: Mixed Media
Part 1 – Physical and Visual Texture
The two artists I have chosen to explore in relation to the
visual texture of paint are Peter Doig (1959 - ) and Edouard Vuillard (1868-11940)
I would like to start by mentioning the following two
quotes, the first from Vuillard and the second from Marcel Proust. Vuillard painted familiar scenes and
interiors and Doig painted what he regards as incidents (as opposed to
accidents) things he regarded as part of someone else’s experience.
‘Why is it in
the familiar places that the mind and the sensibility find the greatest degree
of genuine novelty?’ 1
Marcel Proust: ‘As habit [or familiarity] weakens every impression,
what a person recalls to us most vividly is precisely what we had forgotten,
because it was of no importance and [we] had therefore left [it] in full
possession of its strength’ 2
It seems that both painters feel that familiar events and
things in life are the most interesting.
In painting the ‘familiar’ the artist also taps into the collective sub
conscious that Jung talks of, and in doing so their subject matter
automatically resonates with the observer because of that ubiquitous familiarity.
In terms of style, however, their styles differ yet in terms
of the visual mark making technique, they are similar. Doig uses oil as his medium and his
compositional style often includes the triple horizontal division of landscape
painting to reveal something considered mystical and sometimes sinister.
The House that Jack Built depicts the central motif, the
house as highly textured with coloured bricks, black face like windows and
white trees offering a tracery screen which is so familiar in Doig’s work. Above and below are textured elements which
form a type of shutter and Doig felt that they look as though they might close
and erase the central motif. The
colours used are predominantly red which gives the house a sinister look. We
are left wondering what happened here, was it a druggy den, the venue for a
murder, or a house that ended up as a ruin through adverse financial
circumstances? Perhaps alluding to a final unwritten line in the nursery rhyme.
Doig uses overpainting, grattination, what looks like sponging,
dripping, smearing, perhaps chalking, but he does not use the texture of the
paint, but defines the texture using these techniques. The rhythmic brickwork in
the bottom third is worked over smudged and dripped paint. The top third is
abstract and is predominantly a mixture of red and black marks, possibly
sponged.
Another of Doig’s paintings which illustrates the use of
mark making as texture is demonstrated in his painting Swamped, oil on canvas
of 1990.
Colour is used to dramatic effect and broken tree stumps
cover the swamp. A tracery of white
trees on the right overlays a moon. The frequently used canoe motif is painted
in smooth white paint to present a ghostly appearance. The rendition of the painting again asks a
question, is that a body slumped in the canoe or just some provisions, why is
the canoe floating un-tethered? The
texture and colour provides the drama and gives us clues. Doig’s paint is frequently thinned down considerably,
so there is no impasto employed. Doig uses, tracery, spattering, mottling, sweeps
and layering to produce visual texture, which in this painting is only relieved
by the canoe itself, which is depicted in plain white paint. Doig often used white paint either in
outline or as blobs of paint and has become known as “snow”. He frequently
using it as a screen beyond which the subject of the painting appears.
Vuillard, who was painting approximately one hundred years
prior to Doig, uses visual texture in similar ways to Doig, and employs lateral
and vertical divisions. He was one of the Nabi artists along with people such
as Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Roussel, whose work was very similar, using
visual pattern and tone as texture.
Vuillard uses the tracery of tree branches in much the same
way as Doig, his patches of sunlight are also just that, patches rendered flat
in yellow and green small marks. He
also uses tree trunks as a compositional device as Doig does, some of which are
textured. The texture of the boys linen
shirt on the left is almost criss-crossed in white, his trousers are plain
black with no modelling, as are the distant ladies silhouettes. There is also a
slight suggestion of the “snow” effect often seen in Doig paintings. He relies
on tonal affects to indicate the sunlit patches and shadows.
Where Vuillard differs is in the expression of the subject,
it is not sinister, more amusing as the two boys perhaps hide from their
nanny. Also Vuillard used a mixture of
distemper and glue, or à la colle,3 not oil
paint and leaves it unvarnished and therefore matt. Vuillard would scrape this
off if it became too thick.
In Dressmaker’s Workshop of 1892 Vuillard treats us to a
confection of texture and mark making in the dresses, the wallpaper and the
floor, indeed they almost become abstract, just as Doig’s work hovers on the
line between abstraction and representation.
The extensive mark making is offset by the occasional plain
unmodulated black, as in the bodice of the lady on the left, which is a
counter-change against the white door behind. The tone of the colours adds to
the interest and contrasts with the patterns on the canvas that is divided
vertically giving rhythm to the painting, accentuated by the stripes on the
dress second from the right. It is a feast of visual texture. The scene was
undoubtedly a familiar one at the time and there is no suggestion of the
mysterious, just an everyday scene. The “familiar” subject was something that both
artists considered to be an area with the most interest.
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