I wanted to try out oil painting and ceramics. I have been very lucky to have two wonderful teachers Grace Kotze for painting and June Deavin for ceramics. I have always loved portraits and have focused on closely cropped found images, printed out on my very shoddy printer. This image with pixels and lines has led to a style that is very different from my illustrative and commercial work but is so
mehow a very free reflection of my love of paintbrushes and colour. Started with oils and have gone back to acrylic, I work too fast for oils. I find the waiting for 'paint to dry' impossible. I wrote this about the painting I did of Thando Hopa:
love
Portrait of Thando Hopa, photographic reference by Justin Dingwall (with permission)
Close up, so close that I am feeling only the swipe of the brush and not thinking at all other than what mix, what perfect amalgam will fit that blown up, f***ed up, exploded pixel. Sometimes the stroke is precise, the blunt cut of thick paint, brutal. Sometimes it is so wet and cries, cries in flawed runnels that slide across the canvas, dripping randomness into a shape that is what it should be. And layers, like the bones of long dead sea creatures, softly fit themselves together, vertebrae by vertebra until they make something close to warmth, close to life and breath and fill themselves with puffy corpuscles that float across the eye, almost there and then there and then gone again. Close again and I must be patient like a saint, like a soft dimpled hand, but I can’t because I must suffer an absence of control, I must unsheathe the furies. Rage against the tight fist of closed eye, shut down heart, blank brain beaten. Sometimes I chew gum and that gnashing of teeth is enough to force my hand. I’ll be the clever, cool, trustworthy, loyal, spontaneous, light hearted twin. To overthrow the regime of thoughts, so I can just paint colour as it is. I just want to paint colour as it is.
