Further Suede thoughts

This I wrote in a the comments section of my other blog, accidentally leaking out the thought I was trying to save for later:

'A funny part of the charm of Suede is that they WEREN'T 'originals'... they were hailed as heroes precisely because they did fit a journalist's idea of a great band, being a bit Smiths and a Bit Bowie and all that, androgyny was totally old hat, it was partly nostalgia that made the hype. BUT though they fit a pre existing mould, they did it really nicely. And sometimes it's not the originals who move you...

I think being pregnant makes me think more of the culture I've lived through, especially in my formative years, rather than going back to the 'original' stuff from before I was born. I am interested in what people do in the time and the times that they're given. And thinking by extension about what culture my child will be exposed to (crumbs!).

The Smiths were great, but Suede were mine, at exactly the right time. That music burrowed deeply into my mind, which is no small thing.' - Me

....

Original - no - maybe

Also, perhaps looking for true or total originality is a bit of a red herring, very few things are totally original, and anyway, it wouldn't necessarily make them good if they were.

It's good to know what the sources are, but I was moved by the things I was moved by, Suede had intangibles for me, like some wrestlers do.

I think it's OK to sort of hone and mesh existing tropes.

An idea I've come up against in the art world is that striving after something new and therefore 'important', which is usually about people pompously claiming importance for things that perhaps don't deserve it, but no one can prove that of course. And that seeking of 'importance' is usually more about people trying to make themselves feel good for being in with the avante garde thing and therefore a little bit important by association. When I never really cared about being new or important anyway, I cared about being good. I also always had the feeling that if you tried to proclaim or imagine grand things for yourself too soon, you'd never have any hope of really reaching them. Don't fake it, I thought.

But the art world's sort of all about people creating delusions and illusions that make them feel super about themselves. Oh well.

Maybe the cockiest do get somewhere in life, but maybe that's not the kind of somewhere I really want to get.

Anyway I'm going off the subject of Suede a bit.

How have my paintings been like Suede without my noticing?
Does it make them difficult?

I've been thinking about my most major formative cultural influences. I mean at age 12/13/14/15... I think before that, there were things that I liked, but when you're a child things are just there in the air, there's no pressure to commit to anything, you don't necessarily have to think about which things you like and which things you don't. From early adolescence, I began to really gain comfort and even bits of identity from these bits of culture that I whole-heartedly affiliated myself with.

And of course then there was school to endure, which I hated, making the allegiances stronger, making things like Suede like little glimmers of light and fun and excitement, something that was mine. And I guess I was more leaning towards being a professed atheist then, I wasn't able to understand that there was much beyond culture.
So I was at the private view for my little exhibition at the Electric Palace in Bridport. Some people came who were unfamiliar with my paintings. I haven't done any big elaborate paintings for a long time, and with everything that's happening, I feel oddly distanced from them. I was thinking that for someone unfamiliar, there's a lot of STUFF in the paintings, it could be bewildering, whether or not they were inclined to like it. A lot of gubbins. I hoped it was nicely presented gubbins, but it's still gubbins.

I acknowledged that some of them were 'a bit dark.'

Bit of a dumb statement.

Then I thought about Suede again. It's possible that I learned from Suede that you can put dark or sordid things in your art then kind of make them beautiful... there's even a woozyness in my paintings that's a bit Suede. I will bash out this song, I will bash out this painting, even if it's a bit imperfect and oddly rhythmed and not as precise as The Smiths, it'll be full of feeling and shape and colour and it will affect you.

That was my feeling with Suede when I was 14, when I knew I was somehow compelled to engage with the sordid things of adulthood (as I said on drawing blog) and Suede were an artful and safe kind of way of doing it. Presenting it as a bit of nicely crafted teasy autumnally shaded pop.

I think that ethos did creep in. I had to learn from somewhere, what it could be all about, I didn't really have teachers as such.

Dang, I've been painting in the tradition of Suede and English indie pop, and never realised it.

or maybe people are OK with that stuff in words in a nice book, but they want paintings for their offices with a couple of clouds in them. Paintings with zero content are popular. Like, a bit like a landscape but less committed. Without shapes or earth.

Paintings with just one thing in them are popular, like the kind of things that children are supposed to want, obvious and minimal.

Things with no inner life are popular.

And I've never questioned my urge to present the darker or weirder thoughts in the context of my paintings... where they're safe, where they're totally controllable and contained, but where they can kind of live and gain form. That seems natural to me. I think it is natural and it's in a tradition (in music perhaps), there just aren't so many people doing it in painting...

...Or maybe just not paintings I like. There's that whole 'darque' macabre genre, which interests me little. Like I'm not really interested in Goth or dead art school babies but I did like Suede, I'm talking about a tradition that's maybe a bit more playful and a bit less self-pitying, and certainly not all forced into one mood like those silly monster paintings.

Suede's colours were warm brown and dark green, not so much goth black.

I mean, I guess lately I've wanted to be more Sargent and less Sickert, but maybe the Sickert in me is hard to ignore... (Sickert's very Suede really).

To be continued, I think.