Stevenson Cape Town
28 August – 4 October 2014
Zander Blom
NEW PAINTINGS
Untitled (649), 2014.
Zander Blom on Zander Blom:
“I’ll do it only if I don’t know what I’m doing”.
Untitled, 2010.
“My painting practice is driven by finding new tools and developing new techniques. Currently my techniques rely heavily on palette knives and the paint tube itself. When working with oil straight from the tube you are limited to the available premixed colours. So I have had to develop home made devices that mimic the factory tubes in the form of altered medical injections. Now I can mix any colour and make it look like it came straight from the factory out of a tube and onto the canvas! I find the drawings of many painters to be more interesting than their paintings. In order to resolve a composition spontaneity is often a necessary sacrifice. So it is understandable that a composition can loose much of its life and energy by the time ends up on canvas. I’ve drawn on canvas before to try and avoid this but it never really worked to my satisfaction. I’ve used other techniques to try and make work that is loose, alive and still crisp, but now the modified syringes has led to the ability to control the nozzle size. This has finally opened up a way to make perfect solid line drawings with oil on canvas of various widths. This allows me to do things that are impossible with a brush or an oil stick. There is also a new palette knife that I’m enjoying using. It has tiny teeth and makes these shell/scallop type marks. It gives me contour lines and a gradient in a single scoop. I’m following it down its own rabbit hole. I’ve also started producing my own palette knives to sculpt with in, hopefully, interesting new ways, and I’ve started bleaching some canvases with household bleach.
Untitled (630), 2014.
Lets put some more warm water in this bath…
For the sake of consistency it may be time to take a quick look at the last press release from 2013. Yes, long windy roads, piano sonatas and all that. I feel much younger than I did last year, less mature even, I may actually have devolved. It’s kind of what I hoped for, but it also just sort of happened. I spend a lot of time each day in my tiny music room teaching myself how to not play the guitar. The music I’m recording at the moment is equally as raw and schizophrenic as the paintings. The two seem to be edging each other on, like two unruly teenagers. The act of playing the music loosens my inhibitions, and takes quite a lot of physical energy which allows me to feel a certain satisfaction and release. This helps me to not overwork paintings that come out loose and wild purely because I feel that I haven’t exerted enough physical labour in order to justify their merit. In short, a trick to keep a rational, domineering brain at bay. In return with painting I’m plastering paint onto the raw linen in various shapes with a big palette knife in a very crude haphazard way, similar in approach to my free-form punk experiments. When I think about what’s going on in the main painting room it feels like a child colouring in massive drawings with a trowel and coloured cement… browns and green and red and purple and lemon yellow and cobalt blue and black… I see bits of Matisse, Rothko, Klee, Picasso, etc, all floating or crawling around on the canvases. Sometimes they play nicely, other times they fight each other for space or dominance.”
Untitled (61), 2011.