I have been thinking a lot about edges.
Because I have had the opportunity to work in an increasingly inquisitive and experimental way recently, I have been producing lots of drawings, collages and mixed media works, in a variety of sizes. These have ended up clipped onto makeshift boards (discarded shelves found in the street), or loosely pasted onto walls with bits of tape. They have been placed side by side on vertical surfaces or on the floor, to check for interesting permutations and groupings.
In doing this, I realised how interested I am in what happens at the edges of my works, and beyond those. I am developing a fondness for the raw edges of paper, sides that aren't quite straight, surfaces rendered wobbly by diluted paint. The piece of tape that affixes something onto a wall becomes part of the work, and it feels bare without it. The mere shadow of the paper onto the wall actually moves me.
Equally, recently I have taken a few works to be framed. Oh how I love that part of being an artist, too.
Sometimes a work needs only itself, and I have continued many an acrylic painting onto the sides of its canvas, for it to be hung unframed, straight to the wall.
Conversely, sometimes framing feels like a necessary ‘finish’, particularly with oils: I tend to leave those sides unpainted because slow-drying oil paint makes it risky to grab the canvas and move it around in the studio. But then, those edges look messy.
And sometimes, the work itself calls for a frame. Framing then becomes part of making. An unassuming little doodle can become something special, and that realisation always feels good. And if the work also has those interesting edges I mentioned earlier, then the frame is there to show them off - not hide them by neatening things up.
Paintings (and drawings, and mixed-media pieces) are not just images. They are objects. This much has become obvious to me over the years. This is why a digital image isn't enough to ‘render’ an artwork. It needs to be seen in a place, to be fully felt and appreciated.
I'm less interested in ‘what’ I paint, and a lot more in the painting itself, for its own sake, standing on its own two feet. I think this may be because all along the process, it is an object that I make, not an image.