Like most painters there are paintings knocking around the studio that somehow have never been fully resolved, or don’t ‘fit’ into whatever ideas or notions are going through your head. Even someone like me who has consciously avoided a ‘style or consistency’ tends to group work into ‘sets’ of some sort. And these mostly coalesce into bodies of work.
But then there are the oddities that haven’t quite ‘made it’. The Old Master’s Story is one such. I do recollect sending a couple to a show at a nearby gallery (the Beetroot’ in Draycott – now sadly closed) back in the early part of the last decade but otherwise the five completed, and the several very definitely not so, have languished in various studio locations since at least the mid nauties.
It’s not the only such group. Cold North was a group of six panels I produced to accompany my Epidemic! series (and both shown in the Angear Centre at Nottingham University’s Lakeside Arts Centre back in 2013) and a few years on I started a series of companion panels Hot South. Both were ‘portraits for’ conceits – in the first case of fictional Nordic detectives (Wallender, Hole, Sejer, Knutas, Erlendur, Beck) and in the second a corresponding group of Italian’s in the same vein. But that group has only got as far as five ‘tecs’ (Ferrara, Montalbano,Brunetti, Guarnaccia & Zen).
Zen of course is Dibden’s Aurelio Zen who I sometimes imagine as Michael Kitchen (he narrates the audio book editions wonderfully) but the painting is as always very divergent from the perceived source! I chose the substrate to reflect something of the chaotic and dyspeptic nature of the character…and it seems that – for once – I may be on the money as the latest NYC show roundup on HyperAllergic suggests cardboard is ‘in’ currently!
I’m not sure how or if some of these groups of works will ever be fully realised or will see the light of day away from the studio…but you never know…
Plainly Painting - David Manley 