#I suppose this explains my love for women with cannibal tendencies

[sea-lanterns]

Cannibal Angey eating her own fishies- kinda hot.

I DONT EAT MY FISHIES.

………However.

[mythologyfolklore]

101 Greek Mythology head-canons that have little to nothing to do with the “canon”

(These headcanons merely involve my own interpretation of G.M. and the way it’s depicted in my story. It’s okay, if you don’t like them, but please do refrain from nagging into my ears about it, because these are headcanons!)

1. Ares is both Zeus’ oldest and his only legitimate son (Hephaistos is Hera’s son alone, so he doesn’t count). Sometimes he rubs it into his half-siblings’ faces out of spite. The only ones excluded are the Horai (Eunomia, Dike and Eirene) and Athena, because they're (kind of) older and have been born (or conceived) in wedlock.

2. Ares and Zeus have kind of a parental love-hate relationship. Because ... well, it’s Zeus.

3. Athena has a bitter rivalry with both Ares and Poseidon going on. But they do get along sometimes.

4. The Kronides (Hestia, Hades, Demeter, Poseidon, Hera and Zeus) have a feeling of reverence towards Athena’s mother Metis. It’s one of the reasons why she’s Zeus’ favourite child.

5. I went with Hesiod’s Theogony on their family tree, so Aphrodite is the sole daughter of the sky Ouranos (or more specifically of his privy parts). That makes her the half-sister of the Titanes and aunt to the 1st-generation-Olympians. Thus she’s the oldest member of the Olympian Twelve (the Dodekatheoi).

6. Aphrodite dresses in pink or red most of the time, but her favourite colour is actually blue. Only Ares, Hephaistos and Athena know this.

7. Every time a god/dess is born, the Moirai (the Fates) and the Protogenoi (primordial gods) come to attend the birth, determine their later life and tasks and grant them the powers required. Most of the Protogenoi typically attend births invisibly, so that only Zeus, Hades and Hekatê can see them.

8. Hera and Zeus have a cold love for each other. They’re still married, because he needs a queen and no one else wants to be. And Hera can watch over the family better this way.

9. Hera is in retirement from being a jealous psycho wife. Now she just gives hell to Zeus, as annoying him is fun, if you can get away with it. Nowadays she’s a bitch for other reasons.

10. Poseidon isn’t the wisest of the three brothers, but he often mediates between Hades and Zeus, when things get bad between them. Over time he has gotten really good at it.

11. The Olympians have three collective no-goes: violation of the laws of hospitality, family murder and cannibalism. For obvious reasons.

12. Hephaistos, Ares and Aphrodite have long moved on from the golden net incident. Hephaistos has divorced Aphrodite and remarried. The three have a platonic affection for each other and joke about the shipwreck that’s Hephaistos’ and Aphrodite’s failed marriage.

13. Aphrodite is secretly a badass. She also has a more of her father in her than anyone could imagine. She keeps it from everyone, because she’s too afraid of what Zeus might do, if he finds out. The only ones who have a hunch are Hephaistos, Ares and Athena.

14. Ares was actually supposed to become a god of vegetation and fertility, when he was born. But no thanks to a curse from Gaia, he got bound to become a god of war instead. He does have green fingers though and secretly likes gardening.

15. Aphrodite had no serious relationship with any other than Ares, but Adonis came pretty close. Ares killed the poor guy out of jealousy, which obviously made Aphrodite upset.

16. Metis still exists. She lives on inside Zeus’ subconsciousness and has born the prophesied son that is destined to surpass Zeus. But they can’t get out, because Zeus placed a seal on his mind, after Athena broke out of his head.

17. Demeter wasn’t actually upset about Persephone marrying Hades. She was angry that it happened without her consent; she’s Persephone’s mother after all. But since things have been cleared up, she gets along with Hades comparatively well.

18. If you make Hestia, Hebe or Harmonia upset, the Olympians will collectively hunt you down and fuck you up.

19. The Greek pantheon is in contact with other panthea. Zeus does most of the international politics.

20. Dionysos once wanted to make it rain wine during Athena’s birthday party. But he messed up the spell and it rained pineapples instead.

21. Ares is possessed by a demon. To be specific by Polemos, the personification and spirit of war itself. It’s one of the reasons why he’s so crazy, but he has learned to deal with it. To him, Polemos is mostly that annoying voice in his head. He can allow the Daimon to take over, but rarely does, because he doesn’t want anyone to know about him and because he fears, that Polemos might harm his loved ones.

22. Hephaistos likes to set people’s hair on fire, if they piss him off.

23. Hermes is a kleptomaniac. Nobody likes this.

24. Ares and Demeter had a one-night-stand once. Their offspring was two serpentine dragons and a warrior, because that’s how hardcore they are. Ares loved his monster babies and was very upset, when they got killed.

25. Hades and Persephone have one of the most functional marriages in the pantheon. Persephone is the boss.

26. Ares’ daughter Harmonia is the only goddess, who has given up her immortality for a mortal husband. She was cursed by Hephaistos, who wanted to get back at Aphrodite, and lived a miserable life, before she and her husband were turned into snakes (in my version it was Ares, who transformed them both). They were sent to the Elysion after finally passing on. Hades allows Ares and Aphrodite to visit their daughter from time to time.

27. Despite being brash and loud, Ares is one of the few gods, who actually get along with Hades. He earned a few points with the King of the Underworld by getting along famously with Kerberos and by increasing his number of subjects more quickly.

28. Artemis is asexual, but in a romantic relationship with Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth and oldest daughter of Hera. Hera only tolerates it for Elileithyia’s sake, as she and Artemis really dislike each other.

29. Apollon used to have a one-sided crush on his twin. It was nothing sexual (he takes her virginity very seriously), but more than brotherly. Artemis knows and was really freaked out at first, but forgave him after learning, that he didn’t want to get creepy. When Zeus found out, he helped him to get rid of that love, and his affection for Artemis returned to being healthy brotherly love.

30. Hermes and Dionysos once tried to prank Hephaistos. His wife Aglaia caught them. They never tried again afterwards.

31. Zeus' mental state alone can affect the atmosphere and weather. If he’s calm or composed, so is the weather. If he’s furious, it’s like a hurricane, even if he tries to keep his temper - the weather just gives away, what he’s feeling. Zeus finds this really damn annoying.

32. Zeus, Poseidon and Hades didn’t draw lots to get their domains. They didn’t even choose them. Their domains chose them.

33. The Protogenoi, aka the Primordials, are to the gods, what the gods are to the humans, although the gods don’t worship the Protogenoi. However, the gods respect some more than others. Like the gods, each Protogenos has epithets given to them by the gods.

34. Each race of deities (Protogenoi, Titanes, gods, Daimones, Nymphai, etc.), has their own language. Only a few of the gods are fluent in all of them. Especially the language of the Protogenoi is often hard to decipher.

35. Aphrodite really hates her father Ouranos. Then again, everyone does.

36. Each one of the Olympians has their own mental issues.

37. Hephaistos was born with one deformed leg, but otherwise would have been able to walk. But after falling off Olympos, his left leg was hopelessly damaged and he needed a crutch. Then Zeus threw him off the mountain in a fit and he’s needed a wheelchair ever since, as crashing into an island has left him paraplegic.

38. Dionysos often gets called “baby of the family”, as he’s the youngest Olympian by far. It irritates him a lot.

39. Persephone wasn’t kidnapped. She went into the underworld by herself, because she was sick of everything and wanted to be alone. And as the underworld is really huge, Hades only found her months later by accident. She stayed with him for a while, they fell for each other and got impulse-married. But when Hermes showed up and explained what was going on in the upperworld, Hades decided, that she had to go back at least for a while. They had a dispute with Demeter and Zeus, arrangements were made, they got officially married and ever since then Persephone spent half the year up and half the year down-under.

40. As the goddess of spring, Persephone brings it wherever she goes. So when she leaves the upperworld, she brings spring to the underworld. However, as the queen of the dead, she also has the tendency of taking the influence of the underworld to wherever she goes in the upperworld. Persephone tans easily and is therefore very dark, when she goes down to the underworld. But the lack of sunlight in the underworld makes her grow pale quickly. Then she goes back up and the cycle starts again.

41. Persephone wears her hair short, because she liked it on Ares, when they first met. When she found out, that mortal women had the custom of shearing their hair as a sign of mourning, she was like: Huh ... what a coincidence. Demeter needed a while to get used to her new hair style.

42. Ares remembers the birthdays of all of his (half-)siblings, even those he hates. It’s one of the few nice things he does for them.

43. Aphrodite usually appears to someone as the type of person they find most desirable (x1000). That applies to mortals and used to apply to the Olympians too, until Athena asked her to choose a fixed shape for the gods, because she and the other virgin goddesses couldn’t see her. Aphrodite found this hilarious, but complied.

44. Hephaistos once grew a beard, hoping he’d would look less boyish and less like his mother Hera, but shaved it off again, because he was sick of it catching fire and sparks.

45. Out of all marriages in the Greek pantheon, Zeus’ and Hera’s marriage is only the third most dysfunctional; it’s surpassed by that of Kronos and Rheia and that of Ouranos and Gaia. Most other divine couples have more or less functional relationships.

46. At some point Aphrodite asked Ares to marry her, but he only knew the disaster that is his parents’ marriage and refused.

47. Poseidon has a tendency to make sexist jokes. Athena finds it really unfunny (so do the other goddesses, but they’re not subject of his bad jokes often, so they grin and bear it). Ares also takes offense at sexist jokes, which pleasantly surprised Athena and Artemis, when they found out.

48. Literally every member of the Olympians is LGBTQ+ in some way (even Ares; he’s heterosexual, but demiromantic).

49. Aphrodite loves pinching Hephaistos’ cheeks. He finds this really annoying, but tolerates it, because resistance is futile.

50. Hekatê is powerful and knowledgeable even for a Titan. The Protogenoi blessed her even before she was born. The premature blessing, plus her father being the Titan of destruction caused a mutation. Her eyes are not on her face, but she has several dozens of them magically floating around her head, like an ever-shifting halo. She also ages throughout the night (she’s a child in the evening and an old woman in the morning) and regresses during the day.

61. It doesn’t matter how much at odds the Olympians are, they will stand up for each other and stick together, when push comes to shove.

62. Apart from the 3 top tier taboos (violation of hospitality, cannibalism & family murder), each Olympian has at least one thing they would never do. Be it because they have suffered it first hand or just because they think it’s wrong and it’s below their standards.

63. Zeus is an early bird. The only others on Olympos are Apollon, Ares and Hermes. The others are either night owls or just constantly sleep-deprived/hungover.

64. Ares has a twin sister named Enyo. She’s been banished from Olympos after the Gigantomakhia for remaining neutral instead of supporting her kin. She’s crashing at his home in Thrace and mostly accompanies him into battle, together with Eris.

65. If Hephaistos was able to stand up, he’d be as tall as Artemis (she’s the third tallest goddess).

66. Hera couldn’t handle Ares, when he was a baby and asked Eris to be his nurse. Eris agreed and became his nurse under the fake identity of Thero. A few years later , he was kidnapped by Titanes at the age of seven. Hera gave him back to Eris to protect him, appointing the goddess of strife to be Ares’ guardian. When he was ten, he heard, that he had now a little sister (Eileithyia) and wanted to go back to Olympos. By that time the war was over, so Eris allowed it.

67. Eris sees the bonds between people as golden strings. She carries a sickle on herself. To damage a bond, she grazes it with the sickle, to destroy it completely, she cuts it. The stronger the string, the harder it is to cut.

68. The duty of Harmonia (Eris’ opposite) is to repair the bonds Eris has cut or damaged. She performs that duty even in Elysion.

69. Hera and Aphrodite have one thing in common: They both look like Japanese horror movie ghosts, before their morning coffee. Zeus and Ares both make sure that it’s ready, when they get up. Zeus because his wife creeps him out like that, Ares because he loves his girlfriend.

70. The Moirai, or the Fates, are daughters of Nyx. Klotho (Spinner) has a childlike appearance, Lakhesis (Alotter) is a matron and Atropos (Inevitable) is an old hag. Atropos is mute and speaks sign language, while her sisters translate what she says. Klotho is paraplegic and wheelchair-bound. Lakhesis is the caretaker of both. They’re usually incorruptible and pitiless in doing their duty, but sometimes a god manages to elicit a favour from them (for a price, of course). The thread of life of each living being is a glowing string coming from Klotho’s white hair. A mortal’s life thread is white, a semi-divine thread is silvery, a divine thread is golden.

71. Zeus never really cheated fate, when he absorbed Metis. He’s fully aware, that one day his reign will end and has everything planned out. He simply doesn’t want to step down just yet. Not even he can go against the Moirai and they never spared him his fate - they only accommodated him by giving him more time.

72. Only the Protogenoi have the power to really alter someone else’s fate, but it comes at a hefty price. For example, Gaia changed the fate of Ares, when she sealed Polemos inside of him and cursed him to become the destructive god of terrible war. This led to the child being captured and tortured by Kronos, who hoped to make the personification of war bend to his will (because he’s evil!). The irate Moirai retaliated by granting the original Olympians and their allies a devastating victory over Kronos and sentenced him and his allies to everlasting torment in Tartaros.

73. The Titanomakhia lasted for ten Olympian years, which by mortal standards is a century. By the time it began, Zeus was already married to Metis, so his siblings got to meet both of their saviors. But when he found out that she was pregnant, he panicked and absorbed her. Shortly after the war began, he married Thémis, the Titanis of divine justice and heavenly order, who had joined his side immediately. Together they had the Horai, but broke up, when she learned of Metis’ fate (i.e. Thémis got outta there, while she still could). Afterwards Zeus married Hera, so their first child Ares was born a few mortal decades before the end of the war.

74. Zeus and Hera are a complicated set of parents: one day they don’t give a crap about their children and the next day they would tear the universe apart to keep them save. The feeling is mutual.

75. Apollon isn’t actually that unlucky in love. His failed attempts at romance are just more well-known.

76. Ares is actually quite intelligent. The problem is, that he’s extremely emotional and volatile, has no impulse control and is really hostile as a result of his unpopularity and the things he has gone through.

77. The four virgin goddesses (Athena, Artemis, Hestia and Hekatê) are all asexual, but Athena and Artemis are demiromantic, while Hestia and Hekatê are aromantic.

78. Although Athena is demiromantic, she has never been in love as in she has never formed an emotional attachment other than Storge (familiar love) or Philia (deep friendship). She would, however be capable of Agape (unconditional, selfless love) or Pragma (enduring, grounded love). What she isn’t capable of is Eros (passionate, physical love), Ludus (playful love) and Mania (obsessive love).

88. The incident with Medusa getting raped by Poseidon inside Athena’s temple never happened. I went with the version in Hesiod’s Theogony: Medusa was a Gorgon from birth and together with her sisters a daughter of Phorkys and Keto, two ancient marine deities. She was the only mortal Gorgon, probably because of a mutation. Her affair with Poseidon was consensual. The rape account is a late one and comes from Ovid, a Roman writer, who wrote his Metamorphoses as a jab against the authorities (the Metamorphoses portrait all mortals as hapless victims and the gods as bigger dicks than the Greeks themselves saw their gods).

89. Most of the gods have lived for ten thousands of years. So even though to us it looks like they have one tryst after another, for them there can be centuries between each affair and the next. Of course, a century is almost nothing to them, but you get the idea.

90. The Olympians are very hypocritical. Nothing new here.

91. Hermes is closer to humans than all of the other Olympians. He is also the fondest of them.

92. Ares on the other hand is extremely misanthropic. Which is unsurprising, because he presides over the darker aspects of war and gets to see the worst side of humanity all the time. He considers it a kindness to make them kill each other.

93. Since Ares is Zeus’ only legitimate son and therefore his heir, he has to perform a lot of duties outside of his function as god of terrible war. The duty he hates most is going through his father’s mail, because nobody likes paper stuff. The upside is the confidential information he gets out of it. The other gods are unaware, how much he knows about his father or how much Zeus actually trusts his son with.

94. Zeus threatens his family to send them to Tartaros every time they piss him off too much. But he would never actually do it, because that would mean locking them up together with the defeated Titanes. And despite everything, he loves his family too much to do this and he hasn’t forgot, what they did to his son.

95. Though he has no qualms doing this with his demigod children, if they murder their sons and serve them to the gods for dinner (you know who I mean), or with trouble-makers, who kill their guests and capture Death itself, or people who harass his wife and children.

96. Aphrodite is fiercely protective of her boyfriend and children.

97. Once Aphrodite and Athena had a yelling contest. It was so terrifying, that the others (except for Zeus, who does this with Hera all the time) hid under the table and huddled together in fear. The two women only stopped screaming at each other, when Zeus told them to calm down.

98. Persephone and Hades have no children, mostly because she only likes children, if they’re dead (because they’re quiet). The only reason she agreed to raise Adonis together with Hades was that she doesn’t trust Aphrodite as far as she can throw her.

99. The scythe Demeter uses to reap her corn is the very same one Kronos used to castrate Ouranos. But the only thing that would prompt Demeter to use it as a weapon is, if her family was threatened (like in the Gigantomakhia).

100. Hera and Herakles buried their strife years before Herakles’ deification; when he helped the gods against the Gigantes and saved her from being assaulted by one of them. This is why she agreed to let him marry her daughter Hebe, after he became a god himself.

101. There is one deity the gods hold more sacred than all the others: Kháos, the Primordial Mist. Ze is the most hallowed of the Protogenoi, the Void that predates creation itself. Zir presence is felt in the invisible air we breathe and seen in the gloom of fog and mist. Ze is the atmosphere encircling the earth.

[lostedges]

Lost Edges 6 - bricks

Bricks

 It is a very different process, copying a painting, than it is to make an original study. To make an original study, one examines the form, and moves from the surface, inside the object, exploring underlying surface, then working through the mind and the canvas, back to the surface. Throughout this process, until the last moment, the surface is unknown, and the point at which this final layer is decided upon is a point of delicate decision for the artist. To arrive there, one has passed through a variety of stages: through composition, underpainting, colour shift, texture, scumble and glaze, to arrive at a point where the work is finally abandoned. When copying a painting the artist knows the final layer in advance. They must be willing to move inside the painting, and move gradually to the outside, a predetermined destination, by a process of logical and intuitive deduction. In order to move to the outside the artist must adopt methods not of their choosing, colour choices that he/she might not otherwise make, and move their hands in counterintuitive ways. In escaping the painting, the painting moves inside the artist.

I choose Odd Nerdrum’s ‘White Brick’ (1984). I’m inclined initially to look for paintings far beyond my capacity at the time of choosing. There is something about the brick that appeals to me. It is a humble object, a relatively humble composition, compared to, for instance, Caravaggio’s ‘Conversion of St. Paul’. It is also technically challenging, involving areas of thin glaze and robust layers of stacked impasto. It suits me well. Am I brick-like? In some ways, yes. Solid, dependable, on the heavy, earthy side of physical. A worker. In some ways, like bricks, defensive and self-contained. Obtuse sometimes. Protective, too, in the same way. Not quite impenetrable, but a slow release, like light from the surface on a summer evening. Like all paintings, it has the potential to be a self-portrait of sorts.

As I look carefully at the composition of the painting, I notice the influence of renaissance number. The distribution of spaces is regular, proportions divided according to the golden ratio. Each space around two thirds of that adjacent to it. It helps with the feeling of repose, of weight, of gravity. Inevitability. An eternal brick, though it is crumbling. A classical brick, on the way to ruin. A touch of the Romantic.

I begin the underpainting. Asphaltum, a transparent warm. The brick has a kind of cold, violet heart, so I use Gamblin’s Radiant Violet to differentiate brick from ground. It is frosty cold at first, looking like a Fox’s Glacier mint. I begin to work over this when dry with a yellow ochre, and the brick starts to emerge from the underpainting. The background is too hot. I work with a transparent glaze of Pthalo blue, and it is then too cool. This is not a concern at this time as there is room to darken and to warm with more transparent brown. This is two sessions of painting, usually a week between layers as the demands of my working life dictates.

There is reflection beneath the brick that needs attention early in the painting, so that it can be covered with the later glazes and ‘embedded’ in a unified surface. This is thinly painted, but painterly with dragged paint and with scratched surface. I must be prepared to take risks in the physical performance of the work. I work a little brighter than I need to, Gamblin’s radiant blue, knowing that the glaze of Asphaltum will soften down the contrast. The brick itself is simultaneously too violet, too yellow. I notice also that these hues appear in the upper layers of the painting, and that my paint is nowhere near thick enough, nor light enough yet. I lay in unbleached titanium, thickly. I scoop the paint up with the brush, so that there is half a centimetre clear of the bristles, and allow the canvas to drag the paint from the brush. Too much pressure will thin the layer as it squeezes out sideways. The lightness of touch at this point allows me to work with the creaminess of the paint – sculpting relief form as closely as I can to Nerdrum’s surface without deadening by trying too hard. It is an act of collaboration. The paint wants to fall a certain way. I let it fall and nudge it here or there, holding on as I let go. The brick is suddenly a physical presence, floating in a warm space. I let it dry for a month.

                          Studying Odd Nerdrum, I am surprised to see him describe his work as Kitsch. A provocateur, presumably in response to Greenberg (1939), who conflates the finish in the works of Repin, with the ease of popular culture produced for the entertainment of the working classes,

“ Where Picasso paints cause, Repin paints effect. Repin predigests art for the spectator and spares him effort, provides him with a shortcut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily difficult in genuine art. Repin, or kitsch, is synthetic art’

I’m surprised to see socialism as a source of optimism for the preservation of culture in the same article, although much Avant-Garde was against the establishment of the old art, rooted in European feudalism.

At the TRAC 2014 conference panel, Nerdrum explains, humorously, conversations with Arthur Danto, and the opposition he has found to his works. He describes how he likes sunsets, a weeping boy, a beautiful woman, a pair of lovers on a bench - these are Sentimental! Inconceivable! Kitsch!. Is his work Kitsch? I think not, but have some doubts. If kitsch is a sentimentalised, cheapened substitute for art, it’s difficult to classify his painting this way. Sentimental sometimes, perhaps, but also weird, difficult, obscure, dark, disturbing and poignant and realised with mastery earned at great personal cost. Instead, I think, in the great tradition of protest, a term of insult has been adopted and owned in the name of transmutation. Does it work in this case? Kuspit (2017) suggests it’s a strategy for escaping the bourgeoisie, but rather becomes more bourgeois, citing Nietzsche - that the bourgeois love to be bitten, and that his evasion becomes the cliché he sought to escape.

Kundera (1993) describes kitsch as the denial of shit - an aesthetic agreement with existence, which refutes the presence of death or the abject. I would suggest that both are present in Nerdrum’s work. There is beauty and sensuality, a dreamy fantasy at times, but there is also cannibalism, the false teeth, shitting women and refugees afloat at sea. There is a physical embrace of the abject in the physicality of paint, it’s evocation of bodily substance, death, blood and filth. He describes himself as a ‘mudlark’, looking in the dirt for gold.

Is it easier today to see kitsch in the supposed Avant-Garde - the art of gallery and museum culture, which is increasingly a playground of commodification? A system defined by Roger Scruton (2014), as consisting of critic, professor, artist and capitalist and being as conventionalised as any academy. Is it as engaged in shit-denial as any crude advert for detergent or mascara in the quest for fame, celebrity and cash? Kundera also talks about totalitarian kitsch - adherence to a set of agreed principles as a denial of wrongness, in which the man who poses questions is a revolutionary. The abject painter is perhaps, defiantly, one of those.

 I paint bricks from the ruins of the colliery. I am a socialist with tendencies towards the spiritual. In painting, the material dialectic has pointed to the secular. I’ve had strange visions and heard voices of sound advice from who knows where. Strangeness in the everyday. Blurring of the boundaries. On one hand I am interested in things, drawn to the physical. In painting, the painters who paint thickly, like Freud, Rembrandt, De kooning, Mitchell. Physical painters. For artists like Bratby, the physical application of paint was a working class statement. A painting of the everyday. I’m not interested in the everyday so much as the extraordinary contained within the everyday. Crude painting is not enough. I am also interested in painting that functions as its own space – a space for the mind to translate paint and the ambiguity of there-not there that it creates. I am invited to follow, to explore my own boundaries of perception and understanding – the conscious, the subconscious, and other spaces of the mind, in dreaming, imagining and meditation.

 Both socialism and spirituality could be framed in opposition to Capitalism. The paradigm of western art today is largely constructed by the market – the sale of expensive works of art between museums, investors and collectors. In capitalism there is some inevitability to this. Roger Scruton suggests that ‘Art’ is subject to the market more than, for instance, music, because Art can be exclusively owned - unlike music, where the value is in either performance or distribution. Art, painting, as a unique artefact, lends itself to hoarding, and hoarding is an aim of neo-liberal Capitalism. Daniel Maidman (2018), suggests there are certain conditions that Capitalism requires of Art

         “There’s a set of properties that you need. It has to have a limited supply, but the supply has to expand slowly, which means you need living artists. It has to be interchangeable, which means each piece has to be more or less similar to each other piece. It has to have no aesthetic value, because to have aesthetic value confuses the source of value of the object. The object has to be valuable because the market has a consensus that it’s valuable and not because it’s valuable in and of itself. It has to be chemically stable. It has to be transportable” p.92

He identifies the popularity of Koons and Hirst as symptomatic. Is painting central to this market? There is plenty of Postmodern painting, but often it is informed by conceptual rather than aesthetic concerns. In aesthetics, as Maidman suggests, the control of the direction of the work of art, and it’s value, belong to some extent with the artist. If the ‘concept’, or ‘process’, is the form of currency by which Art is valued, control rests more comfortably with the critic, the dealer. If the value of art is aesthetic, it becomes an outsider practice and lies in dialogue at a level which is not mediated financially.

  When I return to the painting, I am concerned with colour. Nerdrum’s brick has a translucent layering of coloured glaze with scrapes of thicker yellowish white. I lay in some thin glazes of indian yellow and thick yellow ochre, working impasto again with mixtures of Michael Harding’s warm white, naples yellow and yellow ochre, broken with radiant violet. When dry I work with thin yellows and with reds – Indian, Venetian and the pink flesh ochre from Old Holland. The variety of colour in the painting, not obvious in early viewing, reveals itself to me slowly. As I paint I reassert or redefine edges, working Asphaltum into the background, neutralising in some places with a cooler raw umber. I pay attention to the front edge of the brick, lightening and making firm the front corner. The front plane needs to be subtly cooler. I am unsure of the right way to do this. I consider a very thin glaze of Payne’s grey, but suspect it will be too much of a cool statement. I try Harding’s Italian Green Umber (his Terre Verte is too emerald in hue) and it offers a tonal deepening, imparting a weird chameleonic golden shimmer, which is strangely right, if perhaps not quite what Nerdrum had used. There is some fine tuning, but it is mostly ready to abandon.

   I wanted to make my own brick painting, so I took a walk. Had thought of bricks and where they might come from. My home. The house where I grew up. Penallta, house of ancestors, walks, the colliery tips. My place of work, a former colliery site. When pits were sunk, clay was often found in the digging and a brickworks founded alongside the mine. I walked this evening to look for a brick. Made to lie still. To stack. To build. A small thing, but heavy. Solid. A unit. One of hundreds, and best when brought together. To make spaces, by dividing them. A wall, another unit, which can become a home, a barrier, a welcome, an exclusion. The brick is neutral, yet?all potential. In itself, the exclusion of space. Impenetrable. The colours of earth, like flesh;, a palette of location. Specific, belonging. Baked hard. Used conventionally it is strength, balance, vertical and horizontal. Otherwise, hurled at policemen or car windows, or left in a thoroughfare to unseat cyclists, it is chaos. Efficient each way. Designed to be lifted, though it has a weight in the hand. An obstacle to light. It rarely reflects, but in some way absorbs and gives back slowly. Creates shadow. I visit Coedely colliery. I walk and look and after crossing huge stones, there is a brick in a trench, lifting out of the water. Votive offering, body thrown to the water, or gift presented to me. I put a foot either side of the trench and lift it out. It is worn and dark at one end. Charismatic. I take it home and paint it – a broken monolith or monument to an atomised way of life.

I dig another brick out of the ground in the garden of my home. It has a different character to the colliery brick. It is pale, a colour of flesh, flecked with Paynes grey and Indian Red. A sheen when wet, reminiscent of blood. The edges have crumbled like a cut fruit cake. As though it wants to be painted. I begin to paint it, heading in a Nerdrum-like direction, but wanting to make it my own. I underpaint for flesh. Radiant green, working in with yellow ochre and reds. I lay in some darks and highlights. Raw Umber, Titanium white. I look at Hodgkin, Scully, Rothko, for the affect of coloured rectangles suspended in space. It’s clear that some paintings let you in, others keep you out. Rothko and Hodgkin are spaces that you enter, enter you, allow exchange of presence. Scully is a wall, a floor. Despite inevitable depth in feeling and relationship of value and colour, his paintings are barriers that keep you on the surface. Can a brick let you in?

The next layer is Gamblin’s Perylene red. A near full saturation. It is blood. Thick, transparent, alive; contained stain glass in the rectangle of repose. Onto this I paint the thick flesh pink, moderated with unbleached titanium and less or more of venetian or Indian Red, the warm and the cold. I take the blood into the shadow, knowing it will be drowned in darkness later. When dry, the brick now sat in space, alive and breathing, I work the texture, the brick’s distinctive granular nature, hairline cracks and silky sheen. In the background, I leave a band of light in the darkness hovering over the brick. Subtle, inspired by Rothko. A subtle hint of green to amplify the red. The brick is light in a sea of dark. It is on a ledge. The brick is from my home. We all live in the hope that our homes will be stable, but there is always a ledge.