A Painters Notebook

Julia burns

My Notebooks are not explanations, keys, indications or paths, but they can be seen as maps to a province that is mine. I do not know that painting “Is a source and not an echo”- (Peter Lanyon). I suppose I see my work as a territory, a liminal space that might exist as Waugh’s “Low door in the wall”. The formal process of seemingly revealing something is a pointless act as it uncovers only itself; an enigma that only asks more questions. Perhaps for me painting is a container for these questions, a non-intellectual decoder, a respite from having to answer. The formal edges of painting are always difficult and must be fed to prevent self-impersonation, when paintings paint themselves. The source of nourishment is elusive so I am vigilant; I photograph, collect, collate and draw, archiving myself through notebooks. I am eclectic but paradoxically also a stylist. I arrange and rhyme the images, pepper them with collected phrases and pivotal words. I form crushes on artists, pay homage and abuse them by ripping up and re-arranging their images. I live in and out of Poet’s lives and lines; I borrow songs that act as soundtracks to the patina of my ramblings, the narrative of memory locked in the music I frame, rhyme, note, title, fragment, echo, reference, colour.