Gerry Parke on paint and performance

Paint is a tactile medium, with potentially limitless permutations of viscosity, opacity, saturation, lustre and colour. Hence a painting is more than a two-dimensional picture on the wall, as the flexibility of the material and its ability to form itself and be formed gives it the ability to embody qualities that align with or run counter to the subject matter being depicted. The ability to embody meaning through materiality is painting’s unique potency and is content that is beyond a simply aesthetic address. Graphic line drawings bring the outline to the forefront again, but as the work is further layered, these can dip in and out of prominence.

I work mainly in acrylic on board, with additional spray paint, and charcoal line drawing layered on. My style is loose, fast and unfussy, where detail and realism are secondary to mood, tone and gesture. I really enjoy the slipperiness of the medium, and rigidity of the surface, letting splashes, drips and washy sections show the process and intent. I use the phrase “large, gestural figurative paintings” often to describe my work in a nutshell. It’s a simplistic default;  the easy answer for those who don’t really care what the answer is, but gives a sense of what I do without any detail. Helen Johnson, in her book Painting is a Critical Form suggests that gesture serves the purpose of opening content out, “When gesture meets the divergence of paint it becomes a ground of ambiguity.” She continues to say, “Applied to subject matter that resists an easy address or begs an open treatment, gesture offers a means to keep things open, or to unfix them.”

Embracing paint as a language and a substance is a means of addressing painting’s potential. Given that the practice addresses ideas of masculine performance, male identity, group cohesion and masculine “baggage”, it is important to look at what paint contributes to the content of the work and, more specifically, how paint can represent and embody those notions, rather than merely re-presenting observed action via a photo referent.

The performance of the painter becomes critical but how can this performance be calibrated to celebrate the potential of the medium while avoiding it being a simplistic celebration of all things male? Is this just another man making art about men? Is it only adding to the noise, and perpetuating the hegemonic masculine structure? Or can male behaviours be highlighted, even exaggerated, in order to be offered as and for critique?

There’s a self-referential gesture in my practice, almost a pastiche, to paint an ongoing narrative about masculinity using overly masculine motifs. The jostling of original figures, as captured through photography found online, is echoed in a new form of jostling in painterly space across painting styles. I transfer this found imagery onto old-school overhead projector sheets and blow them up to near-life-sized collages of compositions on the work surface. Spray paint is often used as a bold and rough tonal underpainting here, or equally as a highlight on top of a rendered work.

In summing up the core thesis of my practice, I return to a statement by British artist Grayson Perry in his book The Descent of Man: “The male role in developed countries is nearly all performance, a pantomime of masculinity.” This idea that masculinity is more than simply an inherent quality in the male sex, that “it is a performance conducted by men based upon friendships and gendered expectations of a societal construct," is at the essence of my work.

My paintings address how and why men behave. Some works are based on images that document moments in my own personal history, serving to unpack my own experiences and examine how I, and those around me, learnt and then propagated ideas of masculinity. Other images are based on open source imagery, images that capture men enacting, often unconsciously, recognisable manifestations of masculinity. The resulting compositions highlight the rhythms that occur between the figures, focusing on the ritualised relationships in which acceptable masculinity is sustained. “Collective practice is the ritualising of relationships in which acceptable masculinity within social groups is sustained."

Whatever significance these images hold to me, whether as clumsily taken personal photos or images sourced via the internet, there’s more interest in their power to resonate on a universal scale. Figurative painting, by simultaneously presenting and representing life, holds up a mirror to our world. In this context, the portrayal of the individual figures is not about physical recognition or likeness; it’s about the depiction and embodiment of a shared human experience.