By the time I start this piece, a few things from untitled_001 have made themselves quite evident. Drawing from personal experience is a must, yet directly depicting individuals feels too much like a breach of trust. I didn’t think this would affect me as profoundly as it did, as much as I still stand by untitled_001 (as a deeply personal and cathartic piece). Repeated viewing comes with a nagging sensation of betrayal; like discovering the awkward truth behind your favourite break-up song, how this can dull the personal connection you’ve made, leaving you feeling like you’re stuck in a private moment between two former lovers and you don’t know where to look.

With untitled_002 [02:28AM] (I’m beginning to get braver with my titles, baby steps), I made a conscious decision to keep the recalled moments true, but use alternative reference material for the subject. This was such a good move, freeing me up not to worry about likeness (which if I nailed would only leave me feeling even more guilty). Plus, now I can move forward using whatever reference I think fits the moment, maybe I can use my life drawing studies. I like to think of this like those legal statements that open movies and books: “The events are real, only the names have been changed to protect the innocent…”

Nudity = Intimacy

Another hurdle I’ve overcome is dissolving the male gaze, a challenge I face in my work.  For me, nudity often represents intimacy. It’s easy to forget the significance of two people seeing each other naked for the first time;  it’s an act of vulnerability. However, we have plenty of female nudes in art history, especially banal ones. This raises a challenge: with a core theme in my life being women who have shaped my sense of self and my desire to explore and share profoundly intimate moments, how do I depict the naked female form?

In the early stages of this painting, I wanted to create a cohesive form from sections of glimpsed body parts, like a sculpture made from an arm, torso and turned-away head.  While the results were intriguing, I couldn’t resolve the composition without it looking like bad anatomy.  This concept of closely viewed body sections forming a whole resonates with me, even with aphantasia (or perhaps because of it).  This leads me to reject depictions of memory sharing lens-based properties found in film and photography. My memory of a person isn’t like a soft-focus lens; it’s more like a film camera cropping in close to its subject. However abstract expressionist paintings do more for my sense of recollection – the interplay of colour as emotion.  The introduction of synaptic marks (the term I use for my dynamic marks, pathways and structures that convey the emotional information needed to manifest the subject or scene) allowed me to visually separate the anatomy just enough to piece together the figure.