'The Polish Rider'...

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

'The Polish Rider', oil on canvas, 90 x 80cms, 2023

As I come to the end of an interesting and experimental (but when is my painting not experimental?) year for my work, I’m pleased to announce that a recent portrait painting, ‘The Polish Rider’, has been selected for an exhibition on the theme of ‘People’ at The Open Gallery in Halifax, West Yorkshire in January 2024. 

The painting depicts a ‘rider’ for one of the many fast-food delivery companies- Deliveroo, Uber, Just-Eat, you name’em- on the pavement on his electric motorbike as he prepares to head towards his next job. The title references Rembrandt’s famous ‘Polish Rider’ painting, painted in the 1650s, of an unknown horse rider battling the harsh elements and terrain of a somewhat murky landscape. 

'The Polish Rider', Rembrandt, c1650s (a bit better than my painting...)

It’s an idealised, ambiguous figure painted in a much sketchier manner than Rembrandt is known for, but my own painting is an attempt to ironically counterpoint the older painting’s romantic idealism, with my rider painted without any ambiguity about the subject. The subject being in this case a low-paid worker from an ethnic minority background in insecure work and a perilous capital realist social situation. The manner in which it is painted, which is somewhat flat-footed and lacking the bravura brushwork of the Dutch Master, is also important. The only shared ambiguity is in the background, but instead of the mountains and romantic terrain of the original, my painting suggests a backdrop of banal shop-fronts and architecture and industrial sized bins in the inner city. 

My favourite part of my painting is that small area of green bin between and beneath the purply lilac sleeve on the left. That’s an exciting area right there!

It’s nice to get this figurative painting selected as I’ve been trying to reintroduce the figure in various ways back into my work this year and extend out from my landscape work. I’ve been exploring various ways to do this in terms of the painterly language, and how to paint the figure again, with some paintings being more successful than others. I’m not sure if ‘The Polish Rider’ is entirely successful (so it’s nice that someone else i.e the Open Gallery, thinks it is), but I think the idea behind the portrait is interesting, although perhaps a little cliched, but I’m beginning to firm up some ideas of ways of making things work better. 

Nicole Eisenman, 'The Triumph of Poverty', 2009

It seems necessary to shed some ways of working I’ve held onto for a long time, particularly the idea that my work must always come from direct observation. Although I still want to root the work in observations of the world around me I need to be more flexible about how I construct the paintings.  This was confirmed by a visit to the Nicole Eisenman exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery I visited last week, which blew my mind. It was the best exhibition I had seen in a very long time; full of original ideas about representing the figure and taking more playful risks with narrative and the language of painting, all pooled from a vast well of different primary and secondary source material, culture, and art history. 

I returned from London wanting to get on with a new portrait I’ve been developing for some time now, and hopefully loosen things up a bit.