Page 4 - Clive Head

The Bar Raiser oil on canvas 781/2” x 1081/2”
In 2018, Head began to re-think his painting process through some very large canvases that become known as The Indian Summer Series. The Bar Raiser is the last painting in this series. Prior to this, Head had been making paintings from a vast array of reference materials including a lot of photographs. In rejecting this material, Head focused on one source drawing to start a painting and once underway, referred only to the demands and suggestions made by the manipulations of paint in front of him. This high- risk strategy could give greater clarity to his imagination and greater distance from the conventions of representation. If it succeeded, it would be a figuration that could only work within the unique parameters established by the painting itself.
For many years Head was represented by Marlborough Gallery, showing alongside School of London painters and American realists like Richard Estes. Both histories have influenced Head’s approach, understanding and ambition. But the title of this painting recalls a comment made about Head by a curator appointed to develop a different programme for Marlborough Contemporary. He distinguished Head’s motivation as a bar raiser from the contemporary trend of abandoning such ambitions for a direct dialogue with the viewer through the simplest means possible. In conversation, Head invariably talks about a dialogue with the possibilities and impossibilities of painting per se.
The title is also an apt description for the joyous and raucous dance above the tabletops of a New York eatery. Comparing this painting with an earlier painting of figures in the urban landscape such as Viaduct illustrates Head’s change of emphasis away from deep perspectival space, exacting realism and naturalistic colouring towards a more rhythmic space that traverses the canvas. The early stages of the painting had the colours of an English spring, but as it progressed into the summer, it became richer and denser, though Head retained the bright passages of indian yellow which recur throughout the series.
Viaduct
oil on canvas
561/2” x 341/2”
4
Similar in spirit is the drawing LES Sardanapalus which is based on memories of diners and bars on the Lower East Side of New York. Head is also making reference to Delacroix’s The Death of Sardanapalus noting that he fell into a similar spatial arrangement and composition which draws the eye towards the top central-left figure in the middle distance, her head turned to the right and looking away and surrounded with forms that echo this profile.
LES Sardanapalus
pencil on tracing paper
16” x 231/2”