The Memory of Myth- David Kirk's Incredible Paintings - GOLDMARK - YouTube

This is based on the O'Ton Cathedral eve. A huge life-size lintel from O'Ton Cathedral, a stone relief, only survived because someone stole it for a while and used it in the house. And they've lost the Adam, but Adam was sort of nose-to-nose with her coming the other way across the top of the doorway. And it's notable because it's quite a famous image that I've used here as a basis, because she looks as though she's kind of swimming almost, holding the apple behind her, approaching Adam. It was a rare, very rare medieval full-length nude, you know, way before the Renaissance, where it's not a kind of shameful image, the medieval body usually was. I went to a school, a little primary school, where you could do what you wanted. This was the 60s, and I didn't do any maths, and I just used to do painting all day. It's a pretty unbalanced syllabus really. You could choose what you wanted to do, so I came out knowing no maths at all, but having done a huge number of paintings. Without interruption, it could be three or four weeks, because you have to sort of make up all the pattern, and so this was originally partly based on a photograph, although bits are made up as well. When it gets up to here, you just change the pattern into something else. It becomes rather abstract. It is like an obsession, because I have produced something over, I think, about two and a half thousand paintings, and it's a frightening calculation to work out how many hours I've spent sitting at an easel, just moving my hand up and down. This is meant to be obviously in motion, and so this kind of split up, almost divisionist way of seeing it, is meant to create that confusion. So when you look at it, you begin to see that there are lines coming down here, fanning out from a point up here, which sort of relate to the top of the merry-go-round, but the lines continue into the sky, and so all the lines seem to sort of go up to this point here, which would be the centre of the merry-go-round. But then you know that they create these squares or forms, geometric forms, which then of course make little paintings in themselves. So the painting evolves as you work on it, which is different for me, because usually I've planned everything out to the last brushstroke. So these are very different in terms of the creation process. I think it's a response to what you see and experience, isn't it? I think. And your response changes over the years, and your ideas. So I'm not alone, I think. I think most artists look at everything, and all the time they're thinking, will that make a good painting? How can I adapt that? How can I use that? It's quite a selfish way of looking at the world, really. But I think that's not unusual for artists to have that going on in their mind all the time, that process of interpreting something and thinking, how can I change that? How can I make that into a piece of art? But why that happens, I don't know. I think a sign of a good painting, I always think, is if you chop out a little bit, and any little bit could still make a good painting. And I think you could probably cut these up. I'm not recommending that. Chop these up in little squares and reassemble them, and they'll probably make another quite nice painting. Shown for about 11 years. So these watercolours I started perhaps three or four years ago. But they're quite labour-intensive. They take quite a long time to get done. One of the things I wanted to do was create a lot of pattern within the paintings. So I wanted to do stencils in the work. And if you look carefully, I've either drawn through stencils, then painstakingly filled them in. Or sometimes, if they're gold, I've sometimes been able to spray through the stencils to create a pattern. But there's lots of different patterns in here. It's a rather nice juxtaposing flat pattern with real things. And you're not sure which comes in front of which. Sometimes the patterns actually overlap the faces or the other forms, which has been a fun thing to do, and very different for me. And the other thing is, the other difference, the huge difference is that I've made a lot of these up as I went along, which is a process I've never done before. I've done sort of a dozen sketches before I start. Perhaps I'll do one sketch for these. And then they're divided up into squares. And each square is like a painting in itself, which I'm making up. And then as it enlarges, all the squares come together and relate to each other. So it's a really exciting but incredibly painstaking process. I couldn't just do a vase of flowers for the sake of a vase of flowers. They've all got quite lengthy explanations if people are interested. So there's all the thought that goes into them, a lot of background information. There's always been sort of a sense of ambiguity or meaning or an idea, often literary or artistic ideas or little puns to do with art history. I suppose they are partly a product of a teacher's mind or an art history teacher's mind, but they are replete with meaning and inferences. Yeah, I've been teaching history of art for years, over 30 years. And so that can't help but come through in the range of images that I'm aware of and know quite well. So these things do crop up because every day I'm teaching. It is like a patchwork or a scrapbook of little images and ideas and taking it forward and creating new images from old images as well, I think. I'm quite pleased with these because they were a bit of a leap in the dark. You know, I wasn't quite sure what I was doing, but I felt it was time to do something different and I had enough kind of inspiration and enthusiasm to try a new style. I'm actually quite pleased with the results and I'm quite amazed actually looking back how much I got done. I'm quite surprised at the level of detail I managed to put in. Done done diddly done.