5 PAINTINGS
13 June 2005

The story Two Paintings was published as a pamphlet. This pamphlet is placed on the chairs put out for those who attend one of my How To Be An Artist performances. My hope is that people will read them before I come out and begin the performance.

The performance starts with me walking out on to the floor clutching a toolbox and a record player. I place the toolbox on a table and the record player on the floor. I plug it in, switch it on. Take a 7” single from the toolbox and put it on the record player. The record is called True To The Trail and is a country rock toe-tapper and it is my signature tune. While the record is playing I get the other bits and pieces together for the performance. This includes bringing out two large easels that get set up stage left and stage right, facing the audience. Then, one at a time, I bring out two large canvases in such a way that the audience can see clearly the words painted on them. These two canvases are the ones that I refer to in Two Paintings. The trouble is it didn’t all work out as I hoped it would in the last paragraph of Two Paintings. There was no roll of canvas, bottle of linseed oil or tubes of oil paints. What happened was, I had to get the canvases made up for me and my fantasy of using oil paint was just that. So there was no romantic smell of linseed oil wafting across my workshop. Instead I had to resort to easy-to-use, quick-to-dry acrylic.

I have proposed elsewhere that nobody should make any art bigger than themselves. I made the proposal in an effort to stop people making art that relied on the sense of awe that size can instill in people for its effect. As far as I was concerned these are the tactics of the bully; art that uses these methods should be shunned. The trouble is I wanted to make a really big painting. I had to settle for making them half-an-inch shorter than myself. Luckily for me I’m tall. I also deemed the proportions of the canvas had to be based on those of the Golden Section. This meant that if one dimension was 6’3” the other, according to my calculations, had to be 4’5”.

I propped the canvases up in my workshop, primed them, then tried to sketch out the words on the canvas using a ruler, T-square and pencil. This didn’t work out. So I borrowed a rickety old overhead projector from a friend and set to work trying to project the words on to the canvas. It took hours to get this right. Then I got painting. This was it – this is what had been missing in my life for the past 30 years. It was no more than painting by numbers. Filling in the outlined letters with black acrylic and all the background with white. It took me two days to do the first one. Once it was done I felt better and more creatively satisfied than Michelangelo must have done after he finished the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I then got to work on the second. It took a bit longer. Once they were both done I thought they looked more aesthetically pleasing than any work of art I’d seen since I first saw a Monet series of Haystacks paintings. Of course this was just vanity on my part and it soon wore off.

It was then that I decided that the wording was wrong. So I painted it all out and started again. On the first painting the words are ‘A Smell Of Sulphur In The Wind’, on the second one it’s ‘A Smell Of Money Underground’. Since first making these paintings back in 2002 I have repainted them four times already and that won’t be the last time.

Now back to the How To Be An Artist performance. Once both canvases are in place I hope the audience figure out that these must be the two paintings they have just been reading about, then I get my other bits and props in the toolbox sorted, and by now the True The Trail record has started its fade-out. It ends. I lift it off, put it back in the sleeve. Switch off the record player, close its lid and put it to one side.

I then face the audience for the first time, smile and proclaim ‘Good evening. My name is Bill Drummond and I’m here to tell you a story, seek your advice and make a sales pitch. The story I hope to tell you will take me roughly from here,’ I indicate the first painting to my right, A Smell Of Sulphur In The Wind, ‘to here,’ indicating the second painting, A Smell Of Money Underground. The two paintings stay in situ for the rest of the performance, as my backdrop. They are not referred to again over the next one hour 40 minutes of the performance.

Of course I know that these two paintings have no real aesthetic value, and that in reality they are no more than a couple of signs that I have for some reason attempted to elevate to the status of paintings by using expensive acrylic paints, artists’ brushes and proper canvas stretched on proper frames. I mean, Jackson Pollock didn’t have my insecurities – he was quite happy to use house paint and hardware store brushes, confident in the knowledge that his genius would out. As for me I suppose my subconscious was suggesting that if I used them as some sort of prop in my performance, nobody would be thinking that I was asking them to judge the paintings as a serious attempt at art on my part.

Back in my workshop I hadn’t had enough. I wanted more. I wanted to feel that feeling again. That ‘better than just finished the Sistine Chapel’ feeling. I ordered up three more canvases, identical in size to the first two. Came up with the idea that I could make other paintings that somehow represented the other jobs that I was working on. Initially I thought they all should be black and white.

‘Fuck it!’ I thought. ‘Loosen up, Bill’.

Maybe I should allow myself the three primaries. But where would this all lead to? Was I on some slippery slope, a middle-aged man with his hobby? I had to limit it before it got out of hand. No more than 25 paintings. That should get it out of my system.

That’s when I put together the text for a job spec poster. The text reads:

JOB SPEC

Make 20 paintings.
Dimensions of canvas:
Width 1,910mm, height 1,350mm.
The paint must be acrylic.
The paletet is limited to black, white
and the three primaries.
No mixing.
The subject is text.
The typeface is Trade Gothic Bold
Condensed.
These paintings must act as markers,
Signposts or adverts for various
Penkiln Burn jobs. If they do not
Achieve this, they will have failed.

Over the next two years (2002–2004) I did make these 25 paintings. Some were painted numerous times and still I wasn’t satisfied with the way they looked. In fact I’m still unsatisfied with the way some of them look and the repainting process is still some time from being over.

Then I started to imagine them hanging together on a huge gallery wall. Five rows of five but all butted up as if to make one huge painting. Am I breaking my ‘no bigger than myself’ rule? Would this in reality be one big piece of art attempting to bully the viewer into a sense of awe in the way that stained glass windows in cathedrals do, or was it just 25 paintings hung quite closely together?

‘Fuck it! I don’t give a shit,’ was my response. I decided that was exactly what I was going to do. I wanted to do something fuckin’ big and I wanted people to be filled with awe when standing in front of it.

Hours were spent arranging and rearranging how, if ever, they should hang together. Then another idea started to evolve. Maybe these 25 paintings should be the basis of a big colourful coffee table-type art book. The book could be called 25 Paintings. Each of the paintings could act almost as chapter headings. The book could bring together all the different strands I had been working on these past few years.

By the time I had done 25 paintings my urge to paint was not sated. I already had ideas for others. Now that I had started, was I going to be able to stop? Yeah, I know as a medium painting is almost irrelevant as a means of communication in the world we live in. Sending a text message can have more impact on the world. But that’s another whole debate that I will stop myself from getting into here.

For a time I contemplated doing another 25 paintings but this time developing the palette. Instead of the black, white and the three primaries it would be grey and the secondary colours: orange, green and purple. But this never got beyond the ideas stage.

What happened, and is happening still, is me carrying on making these paintings using the same colours, same typeface, same size canvases. Nothing changes except that some paintings get ditched from the 25 to be replaced by others. 25 Paintings 2005 is somewhat different to 25 Paintings 2002-2004. Maybe by 2006 or 2007 it will have run its course, but as I write this in early June 2005 I already know of at least three other paintings that I want to make.