Quarry

This is a creative writing piece exploring the phenomenon of creating a painting on TV and trying to find the genius loci of a place whilst gauging yourself against the landscape, other competitors and the history of landscape painting.

Click here to go back to project page and see the paintings.

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Garlands. Cascading.

I'm going to be asking you questions throughout the day. When you answer I'd like you to contain the question within the answer. What I'd also like you to do is talk to me as if I were HIM. And I want you to use the present tense when you are talking, for example "I use a lot of green in my work", not "I painted that green" or "I am going to paint that green" Is that ok? Now, I want you to describe how you feel about today, without using the words nervous or excited.

Well, I'm delighted to be here today, I love painting outside. I love en plein air painting and for me this is a massive celebration of en plein air painting so what's not to love!

>pause<

Say that again. There’s a plane circling overhead.

Well I'm really excited to get going. Let’s get on this! Let’s do this. Oh, sorry, I said excited.

A thick wedge of reflective foam board is balancing under my face, throwing a wall of light into my eyes. What I wish I'd said was that the thing about landscape painting is the history of it. The noble tradition. You can't just paint a scene without thinking about the canon. And whilst you’re trying to give the canon a wink (or a kick), you’re simultaneously slippy-sliding across a field carrying your easel and all your kit and if you're not careful you're gonna slip backwards and fall onto a cow pat.

That’s great, repeat that line but make it more condensed.

______________

It's very bright, can I put my hat on?

Not yet, we need to film you putting the hat on, then you can put it on and if you want to take it off we need to film you doing that. Tell us when you want to move to the easel and start.

I'm not going to touch that board with paint for at least one hour!

Someone down the line has taken a valium. In my body there are weird sensations that I'm not at all used to. I think it's adrenalin. A paraglider is circling overhead, looking for adrenalin. I'm just looking at a quarry.

I'm going to do some warm ups and planning with a pen before I start painting. Urgh! This pen looks rubbish. I never normally use a pen for warm ups!!

I wonder how Turner would've rendered those clouds.

>break<

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I look to see what the others have done. There's a lot of green in the field. Sharp needles of green protruding up from the ground, each one piercing a drop of dew. Green squeezing out of tubes. Piles of it being picked up, pressed, pushed, smeared and rotated into circles onto canvases. A lot of outlines are going down onto canvases. Outlines and placeholders, symbols and motifs. Is that a tree, or a symbol of a tree? Or a tree archetype? Is it observed or remembered? Or imagined? The lonely tree. The copse with the flat underside giving way to the mirrored surface of the lake beyond. It's hot and sweat trickles from under my cap, dripping onto the paper.

I see you’ve written the word cascading on your workings out. Why is that? I'm interested in the lines and shapes inside that quarry and the way they cascade downwards. I'm interested in the trees and the garland shape they form around the top right.

>moves over to the painting on display<

I'm looking at your workings out and I can't imagine this is how your previous painting was made. I mean I'm looking at it now and if you asked me “how was that one made?” I would not believe it was like that.

I’m thinking, I birthed that one really quick but this next one’s gonna be painful. Also, why didn’t I make that submission a bit bigger? It’s sitting there like a postage stamp stuck on the front of a huge green parcel that’s the size of Wales.

>pause< bee buzzes

The -

>pause< plane buzzes

The thing is....today I'm just aiming to make a painting I'd be happy to put on my wall, throw a frame on it, look at it over again, you know? That's enough for me. A record of the day.

That did not come out as intended nor did it go down well.

>silence<

You can take a break now.

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Someone comes forward from the spectator group. This is hard, she says. Thissss (points to quarry)…it’s just so grrrrrrrrrr (gnashes teeth and wiggles fingers in a clawing motion).

I'm going to transfer over to the easel now and start painting.

STOP. She's moving to the easel. WAIT. Ok, you can start now.

The camera is right up against my face and there’s another time lapse camera above. The paint is squeezed out onto the palette. Coordinates are dotted in paint across the board. They are wrong, which means the proportions will be all out. The dots are joined up in cascading diagonal lines. Swing the brush, press, swipe, reload, push, flick, draw it down sideways, press a little more with the thumb, slowly flick. Close one eye. The palette is transmitting something.

Tell us about your paint.

I'm using The Zorn Palette. It's usually used for portraits. Only four tubes of paint: Cadmium Red, Yellow Ochre, Ivory Black, Titanium White. Finding the colours is a kind of puzzle. There are lots of ‘in between’ colours. The black and white create a kind of blue. The yellow and black a kind of green. And there is always harmony. It's such a mystery.

I meant to talk about genre and orientation. And I meant to ask when is a landscape a portrait, and when is that portrait a self portrait? And is painting always a performance, or only when someone is watching?

Talk to me as if you are talking to HIM. I look around. HE is zooming around the field on a golf buggy right now. Hey! What's Barbara been saying about me behind my back in the halfway round up? She wants me to colour in those shapes with green paint! I know it!

They’re putting a chair next to me like I'm about to have a visitation. I imagine it's Vanessa Bell. How does she pick up the paint? How does she hold her brush? How does she look and measure and close one eye? How does she feel when she presses the paint into the weave of the canvas? What is she wearing? I look around again. Hookers Green is literally my worst colour of all time. If they were giving it away for free at the art shop I still wouldn't take it.

My piles of paint are forming a skin. I push into them with the brush. They spring a little and split open like panna cotta.

How’s it going?

I think it’s going ok...I guess it’s more of a drawing than a painting...it looks like my work. It feels like me. It's really quite slight though. I don’t think it’s enough.

Are you saying your work is loose? Perhaps you can say 'my work is loose so I'm leaving it undone round the edges and that’s ok'. I say that, but it's not right. The compulsion to join the lines together to make shapes you can colour in feels more like bookkeeping than drawing or painting. An act of enclosure. Leaving them undone feels controlled: the opposite of loose. Also, it kind of depends if the lines start from the edge and work inwards, or emanate outwards. All this is hard to turn into words when a huge off-road camera crane is moving towards you and swinging down on your head like a T-Rex about to take a bite.

The curators are gliding around with their hands behind their backs, building their genealogies, choosing who to anoint. The twinkly artist approaches me and shouts 'You don’t care what we think of you do you! You're one of those people!' Well, Cezanne wasn't a competition winner was he? Anyhow, he took 20 minutes to make each mark so that's not gonna make great telly is it, unless you want something to send you to sleep! He's already wandered off. I push the paint into the weaves of the linen until the brush is bone dry, getting the last scumbled molecules of colour onto the surface.

How do you know where to start and how do you know when to stop? The paraglider is hurtling down in his suspended canvas coffin, about to hit the earth. How on earth does he land without breaking something?

Artists, I am about to say 'artists you have one minute to go'. When I say that please look shocked, like you've run out of time. Now, when I tell you to stop, please step to the front with your hands behind your back. This is not the end. We will repeat you doing this. Then after that HE will come and say 'Artists, please put down your brushes and step away from your easels'. Then we’ll repeat that. After that, when I say so, please step down and walk to the left. Then come back and we will repeat that. After that, well it actually will be the end.

>applause, cheering<

>break<

>being filmed acting having a break<

>judging<

When I call your name, please step forward in date order:

The Lascaux cave painter

J.M.W Turner

Paul Cezanne

Claude Monet

Pierre Bonnard

Paul Klee

Vanessa Bell

Paul Nash

Thank you all for your hard work. If you didn’t make the list you may now leave the field.

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Afterwards, I think about Cezanne's quarry and I think about the word quarry, with its multiple meanings. I think about the enclosure acts and outlines and placeholders and leaving a tangle of undone lines rather than closing them into a loop and filling the shape inside with some kind of green. I think about the quarrymen and Marx's division of labour. Men pitted against each other against a sharp rock face.

I wonder whether the term landscape is to geography what the term nude is to naked.

I think about the lake at the base of the quarry. I think about descending into the lake until the line between air and water moves upwards from the bottom to the top of the frame. When that line hits the halfway point it hovers in the tension of opposites. If it moves up or down, the balance of power shifts in relation to the other.

I think about the buildings under the lake and the spectres within.

Click here to go back to project page and see the paintings

Quarry​

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Garlands. Cascading.

Quarry