elbourneandbarnes: The Ghost Paintings

The Ghost Paintings began with a misunderstanding. I was reading James Elkins’ What Painting Is, in which he makes the case for attempting to understand painting using the vocabulary and methodologies of alchemy. His whole theory is based on the material substance of painting, so he purposefully omits complete images, instead describing the effects of paintings in gooey, chunky, corporeal detail.

In chapter 5 (‘Coagulating, cohobating, macerating, reverberating’), Elkins writes about Emil Nolde’s paintings, in which ‘Spooks and specters […] fluoresce in red and blue against predawn mountain skies.’ (pp.113-14)

I suppose the painting Elkins was describing might have been this one:

Or possibly this one:

but the painting I pictured in my head was more like this one (recorded hastily on my phone at the time of reading):

So of course, when Tim showed me the painting he had just made (an imagined landscape, painted from a memory of a landscape, or possibly a memory of a picture of landscape), I couldn’t resist painting a red and blue ghost right in the middle. As Tim made more of these imagined landscapes, the ghost seemed to be a necessary inhabitant of each one. For sure, this was to undermine any chance of the painting taking itself seriously, but the cartoon figure of a ghost seemed apt to characterise these landscapes: conjured up from stylised memories; built from clichés; existing neither bodily nor body-less.