Artist's Statement

Studio statement - short version:  April, 2010

The paintings are based in a long-term fascination with images that suggest interactions between people in terms of emotion and energy.  They happen in an energistic sense rather than as a planned image, and are a result of teasing out images from un-thought/unplanned gestures and colors. The dynamic underlay of marks is a spontaneous palimpsest  for effects relating to emotion and memory.  Rather than representing a certain theatrical time and place, there are suggestions of qualities of personal space, individual mood and/or trans-individual interactions, seen in uncertain space and time. This is a re-thinking of the depiction of the figure: scattering borders and boundaries; questioning the breaks, flows and intensities of energy, as well as working with ideas of space and time.

Studio statement -longer version:  April, 2010

The paintings are based in my long-term fascination with making images that suggest people, their personal space, and interactions between people.

 The dynamic underlay of marks is an unplanned quest, rather than representation of a certain people seen in certain times and places. I tease out images from underlying energetic and unplanned gestures. The result is re-thinking depiction of the figure 'in flight': scattering borders and boundaries; questioning the gaze; using breaks, flows and intensities of energy. I pursue representation to no-longer distortion but formlessness - the formless wordlessness of emotion, intuition, imagination. This formlessness uses clues to raise ambiguities: implied images with suggestions of qualities of individual mood and trans-individual interactions, seen in uncertain time and space.

The idea of 'formless' is touched upon by Georges Bataille in his 'dictionary', and expounded by others, notably R. Krauss and Y.-A. Bois in their book 'Formless'. Hans Hofmann, Arshile Gorky and a number of other painters have experimented with ideas of paintings as a search for the real, with ambiguous space and figures playing a role. For me the attraction is the applicability of the word to such 'formless' phenomena as energy, curiosity, longing, beauty, mystery, as well as nascent ideas, i.e. the appearance of 'ideas' before they are put into (semiotic) 'objects'. I believe it is important to pursue the formless in our object-full world where there is the servitude to semiotics to be kept at bay, ambiguity and potentiality to be given room to breathe and expand. This is seen, for instance, in the quote from the poet Keats in P. Pullman 'The Subtile Knife': '...capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason...'.

I have been a painter since the early 1980's. I received an M.A. in 'Drawing in Fine Art Practice' in 1998 from Wimbledon School of Art, London, and in 2005 gained a doctorate in Visual Art (combined practice and theory) from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Written work for the Ph.D. is focused on ideas about the interaction of perception and unconscious processes (exploring a theoretical basis for the idea of intuition), inspired by the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Anton Ehrenzweig and others. For further information please see the Thesis page for the Abstract of the Thesis.  The thesis is on file in the library of Goldsmiths' College, London.

Perspective - 2006 - 22 October, 2007

Pat Paxson's paintings take a fresh look at the depiction of the figure, particularly the depiction of the figure in uncertain space. They reflect her interest in particular ideas from 20th century art and theory, relating to perception and unconscious processes.

Her paintings contain only very oblique reference to the elements of figure, ground and perspective that have been prodominant in conventional Western Art, whether figurative or abstract.

Background colour is conceived as a surface on which to locate figures, rather than a 'ground' within which figurative elements are depicted. Matisse describes as 'decorative' the use of colour in accordance with compositional requirements rather than for the purpose of describing particular objects. Here Paxson's work pursues the idea of 'decorative colour' to a logical conclusion identifying it purely with the surface of the canvas.

Figures emerge out of marks laid down on the surface of the canvas in a process which creates a kind of palimpsest of mark and erasure, the basis for further marks and erasures. The marks are not planned or descriptive in any way. Energistic and automatic, they are driven from the back of the mind, and do not draw on any conventional mode of figuration or signification whose meanings are accessible by mental operations of a kind akin to the 'linguistic'. They are the outcome of intuitive impulse rather than of conscious intention and determination. Nevertheless, these paintings are not abstract, since figures do appear as the process of mark-making continues, and in some cases they are allowed, so to speak, to remain visible and recognisable as such.

There is no resort to perspectival device. Space in the paintings does not have the qualities of illusionistic, theatrical or of what Lyotard has termed 'disreal' space, and neither is it a distortion of such space, as in the paintings of Francis Bacon. Space does appear, with marginal significance, as inescapable pictorial 'depth', the result of accidental juxtapositions of colour and marks: for instance, a streak of colour over a drawn figure may be seen as 'in front' of the figure. (As Greenberg observed: 'The first mark made on a surface destroys its virtual flatness...'). There is, however, no intentional representation of space, though the space of the colour plane can help to project ideas. 

In Freud's theories of dream-work and the unconscious, space and time are missing, though thoughts, memories, subjective feelings and the energy of the psyche are present. In Paxson's paintings, these thoughts and feelings are present  in the choice of colour and the disposition of marks. The painting does not present a snapshot in time of things seen in three-dimensional space, but becomes, rather, an object in real space, to be contemplated over real time. Unlike the fictional time/space of conventional figurative painting, the real space/time of the present object provokes irrepressibly automatic subjective projection and response.

In Paxson's work, there is no premeditation of figurative forms or of their relations. What relates the figures as they appear is the subjective structure of the gesture, what Anton Ehrenzweig called 'handwriting'. These relations are not, therefore, conceptually orientated. The relations of the figures, being without preconception, allow the viewer the freedom of subjective, undirected perception andd interpretation. The story becomes not that of the painting but of the viewer's own imaginative creation. The paintings have 'emerged', as it were, out of unconscious process: thus presented, they come to life as they 'merge' first into the viewer's own subjective consciousness and then, deeper, into his or her energistic unconscious. The process is thus dual, and the task of the painting is to exist effectively on the edge between intuition and cognition, recognition and linguistic silence. In both the production of the image and its reception there is no definitive determination in any direction.

As a theorist as well as a practising painter, Pat Paxson has also written about the ideas that inform these paintings. Her doctoral thesis explores their development and interaction from Freud to Lacan, Ehrenzweig and Lyotard, and from Surrealism to Matisse. Jean-Francois Lyotard develops ideas of libidinal energy, laxity of the artist and the migration in the human from energistic to linguistic understanding of works of art. Anton Ehrenzweig develops his theory of syncretistic scanning and his positive view of processes of the unconscious mind (from Freud: condensation, displacement, figurability and secondary revision).  For more details about relevant ideas of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jean-Francois Lyotard and Anton Ehrenzweig, see Ph.D. Thesis, Paxson, Department of Visual Art, Goldsmiths College, Univesity of  London, 2004.