Untitled #10

2021

Art and Music: Artists and Benjamin Britten

I wish I could have seen the live performance of Peter Grimes on Aldeburgh beach in 2013. Instead, I’ve regularly watched Margeret Williams’ dramatic film version and am constantly swept away by the music and the performances. I often dip into the film without subtitles to enjoy the sensation of the music and visuals, thereby avoiding the need to follow a storyline.

Reading Britten’s notes for the first performance at Sadlers Wells in 1945, I was struck by his desire to produce an opera that rejected the ‘classical practice of separate numbers that crystallize and hold the emotion of a dramatic situation at chosen moments’. In fact, I very much identified with his argument that ‘good recitative should transform the natural intonations and rhythms of everyday speech into memorable musical phrases’. Britten’s intention therefore was to suggest that if the emotional situation demands, the composer should not ‘be afraid of a highlighted treatment of words which may need prolongation far beyond their common speech length, or a speed of delivery that would be impossible in conversation’.

I’m quoting Britten here because for me, there is something very contemporary in the way he constructed Peter Grimes without the need to use language at the service of permanent melody. Britten’s open approach absorbs me into a musicalized chain of spoken signifiers that give the impression of Grimes’ dark mood rather than a logical ‘spelling out’ of the narrative through linear speech.

I very much hope in some small way that my paintings reflect Britten’s desire to create the sensation of an emotion by utilizing a procedural (or process-led) way of making to arrive at a point of revelation; a point whereby I exceed the given classical languages of painting such as perspective and composition to produce palimpsests of flatly layered, optical restlessness through the combination of poured transparent floor varnishes, opaque areas of house paint, and graphic signage.Pencil, spray paint, card, ink

60x42cm

Signed