Page 2 - Clive Head

Constellations
I can picture Claudius Ptolemy gazing up at the stars and finding an image of the winged horse Pegasus galloping across the night sky.
Civilisations since the beginning of time have stared at the patterns of the night sky and found images and narratives that are at the heart of their beliefs and experiences. It is the human way to imagine that these patterns that surround our daily existence, reflect ourselves, and once imagined, become a reality more pertinent than the stars themselves. The distance travelled in our mind’s eye is greater than their actual geographical separation. It’s the triumph of a human reality over actuality.
The significance of these forms on the celestial plane may have now waned. But in the studio, I discover my reality through a dialogue with the patterns that are made on the canvas or paper that confront me. It is the way of this painter, to gaze at the marks scattered across the picture plane and find an image of someone who is known, or someone I desire or fear to know, or a creature from a dream, or from the pages of a book or a painting. I cannot know what I will find in those marks and lines and colours and that is reason enough for entering the studio every day.
Making a painting or a drawing is difficult. For me to judge it as being a work of art, it must be a unique invention, authoritative and complete. This takes time and a process of constant revision and re-invention. As the days pass, that dialogue with the patterns on the support yields new motifs; images overlap creating further narratives. The result is a heady configuration of multiple images, all of which are integral to a novel structure, or, if you prefer, a heady structure of marks, lines and patches of colour constellating into multiple images, all of which reflect my reality. But of course, staring at these patterns the viewer may well find their own reality.
Clive Head 2020
Elephant in the Room recalls Head’s memories of a visit to New York with his wife Gaynor, and daughter Rachel for the opening of a solo exhibition of recent work in Chelsea. Staying in Chinatown, and travelling on the subway, Head imagined a trip to Coney Island from a by-gone era. Anticipated in the drawing My Coney Island, the painting explores the dark excesses of this fantasised adult playground. Head stumbled into images of elephants, recollecting perhaps the freaks and curiosities of the Coney Island Circus and the Elephantine Colossus, a hotel in the shape of a giant elephant. He clearly delights in such absurd transformations. But the title also refers to an overwhelming subject that transcends the sideshow of anecdotal details. Take a step back and it becomes evident that the human scale of the people in the centre of the painting is displaced by towering figures. The fluorescent strip light in the entrance to the subway becomes a cigarette for a bare breasted figure standing inelegantly. To her left and her right further elephantine figures become apparent and a new narrative emerges.
Front Cover Paintings
A – Morning Star oil on canvas 72” x 46”
B – If Not When oil on canvas 63” x 60”
C – Faulkner’s Medicament oil on canvas 30” x 40”
B
A
C
Elephant in the Room
oil on canvas
94 1/4” x 78”
2