Process Action Process
Sandra Crisp LG: “At a previous London Group exhibition in The Cello Factory, I really enjoyed the use of thick, viscous paint in the work that you exhibited. Your website features many works using gloss paint on aluminium, also a photograph of work-in-progress on the studio floor surrounded by many tins of coloured paint.”
Neil Weerdmeester: “Working alone in the studio the materiality of the making of work can become overwhelming. Drawn into the process of creating a work of art restricted by the use of specific materials and their properties can be rewarding but also challenging. Trapped into the history of painting the modernist tradition and the complexities of semiology and post structuralism I descended into the depths of Baudrillard and Barthes, Picasso and Pollock in a vain attempt to tread between the lines. Beauty in the age of digital manipulation. The process begins with the preparation of MDF or Aluminium base followed by the colour swatch and selection of gloss paint itself a recurring non-choice. In the studio the clothing is adorned and the tools and paints lined up the preferred sizes of plastering spatulas scraped dangerously clean with old Stanley knives.
“Now the studio floor becomes the stage as occasional casual shoppers pass by the windows some semi translucent behind the polythene diffusing their figures like extras in a film. The ritualistic obsessive and performative element is not lost on me. Spontaneity and decision making are required to wrestle with the paint. The liquid gloss is poured the colours not so much dragged but delicately layered over each other gravity levelling them, each colour with its own individual viscosity. The paint tries to determine its own path but is interrupted and guided removed flicked to the floor and left in pools to congeal and interrupt sticking to the shoes restricting my physical mobility, tracking and tracing my movements around the floor. The whole surface coloured reflection, paint fresh from the tin high odour wet and sticky it rolls and moves slowly interweaving, reshaping, changing evolving. Now I invite choice, action, reaction, guided as I am by an emerging total aesthetic, immersed, concentration without moderation, hours pass with more or less flurries of action until content, satiated with art, exhausted I must leave it overnight in the hope that it remains the same, pristine, a recording of the very act of painting. Some wither, shrivel, drift or coagulate overnight their fate to be scraped away returned to an empty pot all that is left their memory the struggle and the lingering toxic smell. Others are successful where the paint itself subtly provides the finishing touch its last manoeuvre a chance encounter with temperature or humidity the seductive skin radiant and enticing, the full fathom five.”
Neil Weerdmeester LG, 2021
www.neilweerdmeester.co.uk
Exhibition
‘Open Studio’, Unit 5, Leegate, Burnt Ash Hill, Lee SE12 8SS, 17th and 18th July -12pm – 5pm
A Question of Process:
#1 Angela Eames LG
#2 James Faure Walker LG
#3 Ece Clarke LG
#5 Ade Adesina LG