Sack Painter

Sack Painter - 00:12:23 - Philip Elbourne and Tim Barnes - 2012

The Sack Painter

Phil: When I decided, a year ago, to abandon sculpture and installation and become a painter, I was essentially binding myself up. Choosing to paint always means imposing self-limitations. This is how I see the Sack Painter. Do you see any significance in the paintings being made outside the sack? Is this indicative of the process of painting?

Tim: The unsacked painter might feel vulnerable and in a sense their paintings beg an affinity with its painter. The sacked painter expresses a desire to depart from this relation, (Sacked as in both wearing the sack and also made redundant of the painter’s duty). A certain weightless integrity can perhaps be mined. I think the significance of a painting is driven by its cultural, historical context or even the painter’s dispositions, maybe the sack acts as a shelter in the storm of criticality, the eye of which has settled over painting. There is also an unspoken power woven into the sackcloth, one that renders the painter invisible. Perhaps it might also be bulletproof. 

Phil: The sack metaphor works two ways. Firstly, as I mentioned, to paint is to constrain oneself within one’s medium, to be isolated from the external world and yet to reach out from one’s isolation in the creative act. Also, the painter is faceless; we cannot discern their intent or even their age or gender. All we can see is the painting they have made.

Tim: Yes, I would agree.

Phil: For me, one of the most memorable images in the film is of the sack being sewn up and a heavy, corpse-shaped bundle being delivered into the workspace. Shall we bother saying anything about the death of painting?

Tim: Or the death of the painter. Painting perpetually phoenixing, yo-yoing between object and subject. I can’t help thinking of zombies when I see that. It seems what is birthed in the film is the painting and serving it is the painter rotting in a bag.  

Phil: We made sure to take the bells off your paintbrushes before filming… Do you want to say anything about shamanic painting?

Tim: There are some similarities, this was my attempt to revitalise painting. But all it really did was open a discussion surrounding failure. I think the sack painter is more refined and successful in foregrounding its own revelation.

Tim: It would seem, following discussion, that the comtemporary British artist Philip Elbourne is a separate entity to the sack painter. Which one of you is Batman and which one is Bruce Wayne?

Phil: Yeah, or maybe Bruce Banner and the Hulk. I suppose with Batman, he’s physically no different from Bruce Wayne, but in donning the bat mask he is freed to act beyond his social remit. I think all painters secretly yearn to do this, to put on a disguise and be permitted to just make instinctively without having to justify it, to be exonerated in turning out rubbish abstract expressionism.

Tim: First the ghost paintings, which undermine any chance of the painting being taken seriously, now a dubious, unknowable painter. Is painting losing its integrity? I wonder what would happen if a mirror was taken into a gallery and paintings were shown reflections of themselves. Would they beam back in admiration or would they slowly slip down the walls in embarrassment like butter, leaving a slippery trail?

Phil: Oh come on now, painting lost its integrity a long time ago. I think it has something to do with it being so neatly consumable. I once saw some of Imi Knoebel’s paintings all hung facing the wall, as if they were ashamed. I like the idea that a painting could be apologising for its own existence.