Curriculum Vitae XI-XV
Curriculum Vitae XI
oil and acrylic on board
150 x 120 cm
1986 - 1992
Notes on this work
Curriculum Vitae XII
oil and acrylic on board
150 x 120 cm
1986 - 1992
Curriculum Vitae XIII
oil and acrylic on board
150 x 120 cm
1986 - 1992
Curriculum Vitae XIV
oil and acrylic on board
150 x 120 cm
1986 - 1992
Curriculum Vitae XV
oil and acrylic on board
150 x 120 cm
1986 - 1992
The format of these pieces has taken some while to evolve, Andy Gizauskas, my assistant, has worked to find better ways of making the structures, and I have vacillated over the precise relationship of text to picture. The central image is of course the text, the commentary in each case being the surrounding pictorial matter, which in some cases is also formed out of text. This is a reversal of procedures I have used in previous paintings where text surrounds a pictorial image. Once more I emphasise the fact that I regard texts as images in their own right: treated as they are here with words ghosted behind words to form a (literal) subtext they are all the more image for being doubly text.
The script itself, almost invariably a bastard Roman of my own evolving, is carved back from the rough letter form rather than painted how it is seen (I have got through more Swann & Morton no.15 scalpel blades than a surgeon in his whole career). Since each line of verse has only a line of the script to accommodate its ten syllables, much shuffling about at the roughing-in stage is necessary to space the words correctly, for lines like
and labelled with the lengths of useless screws
are no longer, in terms of syllables, than
the valetudinarian plays on.
On a good day (composition of the text aside) I can clock up about two and a half lines. Punctuation is idiosyncratic, with two kinds of stops; a single dot to stand for comma and semi-colon and a double dot to stand both for the colon it resembles and a full stop. My penchant for brackets is given full play.
The text is not written in advance and I am normally only a couple of lines ahead of the painting. I have no idea how the whole text of each panel will end up when I start: often they take quite a different turn from what I'd imagined. In CV XI which talks about food the original idea was that it should be a joyful celebration. It ended up however as a dark elegy on sin and theft terminating in a funerary inscription. Each section of the verse is rounded off, like the scenes in early Shakespeare, with a couplet or quatrain. (cont.)