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Words and paintings

He said the oceans were rising
Tina Mammoser, acrylic on canvas (from the Dark series)

Rodney

"So I started using words. Sometimes that grew into having an entire stanza of a poem, either written on top of the painting when I finished or scratched through the various layers. It's because I just realised that words are abstracts of themselves. They're an abstract of a meaning. They're not real things unto themselves other than words. They're symbols."

Tina

"Yeah, they're just arrangements of letters. I like your new one "Social Media". Because I saw that in an exhibition and it wasn't until today, looking at the picture, that I saw the equations. I'd seen the symbols and I knew there were letters there or something, but I hadn't looked closely enough. Today I looked at it and went wait a minute there's brackets and equal signs and those are equations! And you've done them backwards, which I like because it takes away a level of meaning."

Rodney

'It takes away, and that's the way it was shown in the movie - it's taken from the movie "Social Media". And in that movie when he's just gotten dumped by his girlfriend and he's going to do this comparison "which girl's prettier", and his mate comes in and he goes up and writes it on the window. We see it from the outside, reversed, and then we see it from the inside. So I chose to do it from the outside because it's a little more abstract. One in my Venice series that I stuck words in there later, because most of my Vencie series have no words in them... they have illusions to words by having doodle or scribble-like lines in them that somehow suggested words but weren't words."

Social Media
Rodney Beecher Roberts, mixed media on canvas

Tina

"I've done a Venice series as well and mine are symbolic, mine are symbolic of kinds of light. Because I've done shadows under the bridges, and the way lamps reflect off the river... that's where a lot of the gold is coming from, because it's night, and I was only looking at the water surfaces."

"With the English coast it's actual place names. With Venice I wanted it to be actual Italian phrases for the kind of light I was painting. In fact the only series where I haven't used a very specific title that was what I put in the paintings was the Dark series. Those are named after song lyrics. So instead of being the place or the light it was the feeling of when I was painting it. There the only ones that aren't specific places as well. So then I couldn't title them with places because I felt I was lying. So each one of those I listened to one song over and over again. So each title is the song I listened to while painting that painting."

Abstraction: conscious vs subconscious

 Excerpt from artist conversation:

 

Tina

"You have this whole thing where you don't sketch because it inhibits your creativity, and the fact that you work with so many materials and you're much freer. I'm so precise with my stuff, and I'm always thinking when I'm actually doing it. I'm always analysing it with each layer of paint."

Rodney

"Unfortunately thought does creep as I'm painting and I hate that! It invariably makes me take the painting in a different direction than it wants to go, as they say. My subscious is trying to do something and my thought process gets in... no! Stop that!"

Tina

"You want your subconscious to take over."

Rodney

"Yeah "

Tina

"And I want my intellect to take over."

Rodney

"Anytime my intellectual gets in the way, I hate the painting 2 weeks after it's finished and I have to paint over it. It misses. If a painter or artist starts with the end in mind and can achieve that end, that's great. But that's not where I work from. I can't do that. And every time my thought process gets in the way it changes the painting and it doesn't work any more."

Tina

"If I am painting and I let my emotion take over, which isn't to say I'm not emotional when I'm painting - I have a sort of joy from it - but because I am so analytical if I start painting for catharsis I end up finishing a painting and looking at it and thinking 'my god that sucks'.  So I start with an idea, then a plan, and I try to stick to the plan, or replan. I like to know there's a balance and a sense of making your eye move around in a specific way."

See the coast paintings tina-m.com