I’m quite evangelical about painting as a language on its own terms, on that notion I’ve often expressed before of good painting functioning as a visual onomatopoeia in that it has the capacity to express something deeply-held while remaining non-explicit, that it doesn’t necessarily require precise analysis in order to communicate, that it does so almost viscerally.

Working alla prima, there’s a moment when the whole painting has to come together at every level, of composition, colour, form; there’s a working through the layers, and not just the juxtaposition of mark-making, so it’s a something of a tight-rope – of reaching that sweet-spot of bringing the image up to the surface, and to the boil, yet not over-working –
It’s a work of distilling, of essence and suspension, and a slow reveal.

I mentioned Stella’s ‘Working Space’ to you yesterday – there has long been a sense for me of the fertility of the pictorial space in Caravaggio, that Rubens understood and exploited so well, that allows an opening-up of a variety of spaces or viewpoints within the picture plane, without yet losing the coherence of the whole – and it is in that sense of complex spatiality that my work might be considered neo-baroque (as per Grant Vetter’s reading of my work in the recent catalogue essay) – it’s no doubt what Hans Hoffman expressed more basically as the push and pull of the picture plane. There’s a miracle that operates, of a stretching and stopping of space, and with it, time; and the Ariadne’s threads that can lead the eye down those multiple wormholes (the edges bear witness in a different way to the time encapsulated in the work, through their strata, with an almost geological reading).
Yet the overall cohesion or wholeness is also important; the working method in any case requires a unity of time, and the medium requires a unity on an (al)chemical level -
It is important to me in the final instance that the work function as a vehicle for sensation or even emotion, that it be highly evocative; yet retain its openness. Painting is a space of projection par excellence, for the painter, but also for the spectator – it’s impossible to fight that, nor would I wish to - it seems to me to be one of the specific riches of the language –
Again, there’s a sweet-spot and a doubleness there – all painting at this point in time (and since late Titian at the very least) is meta-painting – performs that conjuror’s trick of being both itself and something else at the same time, of being and representing (Kirkeby talked of assuming the fundamental ‘dishonesty’ of painting, as a thing of tricks and larceny): there is always an absolute and ongoing pleasure of the medium and materiality in itself, and beyond that, that projection both allows and accepts a number of perfectly valid readings.

Similarly, there are always a number of fairly diverse influences that feed into any one specific work; ‘Goya’s Cat’ is a work I painted not long after a trip to Rome - I’d gone to look at the Tiepolos, and his celestial spaces, and found Caravaggio creeping into the studio on my return – the palette of his ‘Rest on the flight into Egypt’ comes to mind – I had also been no doubt experiencing that depth and complexity of space in his works (as per Stella) more completely than I had previously.

The format of the work is a slightly taller format than I was used to working with then – only by a few inches, but those inches take the work from being life-size to just over (at least for me), which created a dynamic shift in the physical relation and response to the work – and which no doubt put me in mind of Goya’s dog in the Prado. And yet there’s something more cat-like in the movement and space of the work - think of T.S. Eliot’s cat-like fog in the beginning of Prufrock, rubbing its back against the windowpane, to curl once about the house – a sinuosity, an abstracted ‘figura serpentinata’ of paint.

Erin Lawlor, June 2022