10 Feb. 2020

The last painting I am working on has gone through many reconfigurations and readjustments. The main theme revolved around the concept of hunting as an aristocratic habit in confliction with the middle and low class man that fights in war (first world war). I sketched and started to draw but the composition seemed unbalanced while the use of colors felt indecisive and hesitant. The whole thing got erased with only exception the dead soldier.

Afterwards I started to research about war artists I stumbled upon a painting named Mother Mourning the Death of a Village Priest,(1945). The artist created it is Leslie Cole. He served as a war painter on Second World War and, quite surprisingly went to Greece (among other places ) on 1944 and stayed there during the German withdrawal. The figures on this image reminded me the monumental figures of Kathe Kollwit’s print the mother. The characters aren’t certain people, they have no name hence no identity. Their existence on the canvas is the manifestation of a mourning mother on the site of her dead son both depicted with raw and brut faces. I also find very insinuative how the use of shroud separates the two figures and creates a barrier.

But still the figures were stiff and drawn with hesitation while the many layers of colors just made the canvas more confusing and unbalanced. I realized that the problem wasn’t thematic but rather the approach I had when I was working on this painting. I was very concerned about it I didn’t let the creative flow take me and drive me through the theme I explore. Now I am in a stage of reconfiguration again that hopefully will culminate to piece. The intention I have is to add elements which will create a feeling that the scene takes place on a harbor, but always keeping as main themes the mourning mother. This idea came while searching about a German painter called Beckman and his painting The Departure. His figures are surreal even mythical and the colors are used so boldly. That’s the type of narrative I am looking for. A narrative beyond any theme that you can’t define the era which takes place nor you can totally decipher it, and actually you don’t want to, myths unfold stories about the human mind but they always have an obscurity which makes them interesting. That type of narrative I intent to waive on this painting like Beckman or Neo Rauch or Peter Howson by creating figures out of time and context who don’t seem to have any actual relation anywhere else except the surface of the canvas.