Studio blog

News and updates about Tom Phillips, posted by the artist himself

Wednesday, 02 January 2008 15:02 Written by  Tom Phillips

My painting cont'd IX

my painting 13.12.07

State of play at Christmas 2007. Still no title. Too many analogies present themselves. Today I felt as if I were cleaning a picture which has long existed, moving along a murky surface to reveal a work obscured by time's dirt and decay. Sculptors often (as in Michelangelo's poem) say about carving in marble that the imprisoned sculpture has only to be released from the stone by chipping away the bits that are not it. Here in two dimensions I seem to be working in positive/negative modes taking my cue from what is light to make it dark and vice versa. Together with the ambiguities of the underpainting left untouched this seems to make Time's Arrow turn back on itself.

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