03.2 — Figure
From Academic Study to Material Experiment
This painting from 1983 marks a transition from academic figure drawing toward a more experimental approach to painting. The subject originated in a small study made during an academic drawing class, approximately 25 × 30 cm. I returned to the same figure on a radically different scale—150 × 150 cm—and with a material I had not previously used: industrial dispersion paint on cardboard.
The inexpensive, fast-drying paint encouraged another way of working. Rather than carefully constructing the figure through academic modelling, I worked rapidly and directly. At this larger scale, the body became a field of gestures: brushstrokes move across the figure, the bed and the surrounding space, sometimes defining the body and sometimes allowing it to dissolve into the painting.
At this period I was searching through new forms and materials without knowing in advance whether an experiment would succeed. Some works resisted, some failed, but I generally kept them. Looking back, these experiments were important precisely because they allowed the material and the act of painting to begin challenging what I had learned through academic drawing.
On the Bed, 1983
Dispersion paint on cardboard · 150 × 150 cm
