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There, I’ve done it again. I said I wouldn’t but I’ve fallen for it one more time: wrapped two paintings up last week and drove them south of the river for the Montijo International biennial that is scheduled for August. You’re thinking that I’m not a man of my word and you are right – in one of my last videos [and a blog] you do hear me and fellow studio-buddy Fernando Vidal saying ‘Never Again’. He’s to blame; not so much for the ‘never again’ but for luring me into the trap when he walked in to the studio with a devious grin on his face and the application forms in his hand. The prize is too good to ignore: 15000 euros for first prize in painting – and, as Fernando keeps reminding me, the worst that can happen is for the jury to say no and we’ve both accumulated sufficient anti-bodies to rejection to come out of it with any significant bruises. In a last-minute outburst of bravado I concocted a short video out of old bits and pieces I found in scattered DV tapes and entered for video as well – 3000 euros first prize. I figured that if the worst that can happen is a ‘No’ I might as well attack on as many fronts as they let me. No doubt this is attributable to a sudden bout of latent survival instinct kicking-in as I reach the final lap. It’s hard to believe I’ve actually been here three years and that one year from now I’ll be packing my stuff to move on once again. I’ve concentrated almost exclusively on the studio work in the past three years here in Portugal - painting and, most recently, toying increasingly with video - and I haven’t worried too much about showing. But as departure date gets closer I guess there are a few things I would like to leave in place, and getting into a major show at national level wouldn’t be a bad way to start the ball rolling. In a way it is already rolling because Fernando, Rui and I have a project approved for December at the Cascais Cultural Centre just outside Lisbon, but finding ourselves in a biennial in August could attract some ‘more serious’ interest in what we are doing. Seems like good strategy at any rate. We’ve been given the uppermost room of the Arts Centre for the greater part of December and all of January, just right for the three of us, and our show will run concurrently with [yet another] Picasso exhibition which starts a week before ours. Instead of aiming for a simple group show of individual works we have decided to intervene in the space and create a project that will include painting/installation/video. I suggested we pick up on the theme I launched in Brunei in 2005 – [3] Artists/One Boat - and so we’ve been getting together for regular brainstorming sessions which I sometimes capture on video to include in a projection on the 4th wall of the main exhibition room. Although our individual paintings will form the basis of the exhibition the idea is to transform the actual space into a vessel that will carry the viewer into whatever world we come up with by then. We are currently toying with the idea of using black light to enhance whites, and inscriptions and drawings in chalk on the ground – perhaps blueprints and technical data of boats and things that carry things. We’ll be transforming the space into the vessel itself, a nave or a uterus – the threshold of a new world. Eventually, to my mind, the show itself will yield yet another video. Apart from this specific and recent project, and looking back at the days at the studio, this is the first time that I have worked without an individual show in mind [not necessarily in the sense of there not being a fixed date, but even more profoundly of not holding the thought in the back of my mind whilst painting that each individual work must necessarily become a part of something]. I’m just painting and working for the sheer joy of it. I don’t recall ever having gone about things this way. Of course this presents certain other obstacles such as when is enough, enough? At times I feel I’m moving in circles or overworking the themes I undertake. When I had a date or a place in mind to show the work I was doing the numbers and the ideas organized themselves and the odd painting could be left out in the end, and I never felt I overdid it. Once the show was over, that was the end of it and I’d move on to something else. But now I sometimes feel I’m overdoing it. I can barely move around at the studio and the presence of all that stuff isn’t helping me move away from the world I’m surrounding myself with. I’ve thought about bringing a few home but visitors to the studio and the students at [OD] come in to take a peek sometimes and like things the way they are, so I keep delaying – how the ego so loves the little pats on the back. I’m eager to leave the ‘trees’ and the ‘longboats’ behind and start researching old Portuguese tiles for my next project [the blues, the yellows, the umbers, abstract on an off-white background, yet still retaining their portugueseness]… but I still haven’t felt that click. On a final note in these scattered considerations that sprang to mind while thinking about how time flies and things change, one of the things I never thought I would truly adapt to was working with others. You may remember that I resisted leaving my old studio and moving in to [OD] at the end of 2006, and that one of the main reasons I mentioned was loosing my aloneness – my space to think and feel whatever it was I wanted to think and feel without interference and without having to constantly explain or justify myself – why the sudden red there? Why another tree when the painting looked great ten minutes ago… without it? I kept a safety buffer between the studio and the World… Now, the buffer has somehow dissolved and outside questioning and explaining helps to detect the pitfalls and the new paths that open up, it’s become a good thing.
Fernando and Rui are old friends, open and passionate about their differing views, and as such they are entitled to have their squabbles on and off, but I get along with both of them just fine – there is such a great deal to learn just from being around these guys. And whenever the students are in they are very respectful of my need for space and quiet and don’t pose a problem: if I have time I wave them in and we chat for a while, if I don’t, I just make a gesture with my hand in the air to acknowledge their being there and they know to watch from a distance before going back to their own tasks. At other times I’ll walk past to get water or wash my brushes and I stop here and there to comment on the progress they are making in their own work and whatever difficulties they may be experiencing. It all works out much better than I had anticipated and I know that this is one of the things I will surely miss when the time comes to step off this boat.
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