Linda Sgoluppi - My conversation With a Painting - Stratum 2010

When I started the Stratum paintings my underlying intention was less clear than it normally is when starting a new series. At the time I felt had to start work, even with ambiguity because sometimes ambiguity is all there is to start with.

In the conversation we talked of quarries, of layers, of strata, I said I didn’t want the strata to be something seen from outside like looking at a picture, rather it was me and paint being strata. Not an event viewed from outside but an actual event in progress. I guess this might be difficult to understand, I’m not sure I understand it myself.

Earlier in the year I did some small experiments in the studio. I might have curtailed them too soon, I do that if I think I am moving too far away from paint. If there is a time I start to feel bored with experiments then it’s time to leave them whether or not I return to them later. One of the experiments was with moving paint around a surface with magnets.

Around the same time I was documenting what I was observing at a local quarry.

Sometimes my projects, ideas, and experiments, collide, mingle or overlap and even cancel each other out in the way an exploding volcano cancels itself out then leaves something else in its place, something that couldn’t have been there without what preceded it.

There is a beautiful Caldera on the Greek Island of Santorini. A caldera is what remains after a volcano has blown up, leaving a hole that usually fills with water. Santorini’s Caldera is what remains of a cataclysmic event that wiped out a remarkable civilisation. I hadn’t known its story until I learned of it during a visit many years ago.

Unlike my first view of the Santorini Caldera, I am not ignorant of the projects, ideas and experiments that remain of my metaphoric caldera, formed during work in progress. I struggle with my calderas, they’re a constantly uncomfortable place to be. They are also constantly important places to be, each one is a place to question my creative intentions, to recognise there are conscious intentions as well as sub-conscious ones. It’s a place that’s always shifting, like the individual bit of the Earth we each inhabit and what we think of as being ‘as solid as a rock’ when the reality is that the rock’s solidness is illusory. Nothing is as fixed, unchanging or as solid as we might like to think.

The paintings I’m working on and of which Stratum # 1 is the first one to be finished, are called Stratum. I’m not a Latin scholar but I understand that Stratum is the singular of Strata. Using Stratum as a working title is in my the pre-caldera intentional mix. It’s a mix that includes my thoughts about quarries and the special qualities they have. Strangely, the mix also includes elements from the magnet experiments, though not the use of the magnets themselves.

Also in the mix are those intentions that sometimes slip from my conscious into sub-conscious, the constant fascination of how materials perform. In the Stratum series I’ve found a new way to mask some areas of the paintings during the painting process. Finding out where this new way might lead is itself an intention.

I forget sometimes that I am always experimenting with materials. I bring experience to the process but it’s important to me that I never forget that I don’t know. I don’t know how the combination of the elements of a studio session will unfold, whether it’s the way tomorrow’s physical atmosphere will be, how that might affect the viscosity of a drip running down the canvas or whether it’s what I bring to the studio tomorrow in terms of state of mind, mood and so on.

In the process of painting the Stratum Series. I stopped painting for several days to think over what the paintings are telling me about my intentions. It is so easy to forget to listen and I don’t ever want to forget to listen or to be too busy talking that the other participant in the conversation, the painting, doesn’t get a chance to speak.