Some years ago I watched a documentary about one of Britain’s great contemporary painters. I won’t name her, but she’s my generation and I think I was in an exhibition with her when I was a student in the 1990s. I remember thinking then that the work, which was getting a lot of attention, was essentially rather large, Alevel life paintings that looked like ‘painterly photographs’. She didn’t seem to be very interested in thinking about how we see things, which was and I think still is, one of my main interests. I can’t understand why, if you’re going to paint, you would feel that it will be finished when it looks most like a photograph. Take a photograph! Why paint if you know what the end result will look like? But that’s not the point. What I am ranting about this month is grants: funding for artists.
As the camera panned about her massive studio (if a camera panned about my studio it would knock something and hit the wall) it picked up on the huge easels and the trolleys with big glass palettes on them, laden with unbelievably expensive paint tubes. I know, because I buy that brand too, but she can afford it.
DP Macnally’s Self Portrait, oil on linen, 193⁄4 ×193⁄4in (50 ×50cm). I am working on a series of paintings and a story about a couple of artists and their careers. This is DP Macnally, who was briefly famous in the 1980s and is now a cultural studies lecturer in a university