Dennis Hollingsworth

Painting

Anti-Delusionists
#393
2011
30"x24"

The story behind this painting: One Sunday, I returned to the studio after the day of an opening in Chinatown where a late night party was had in my studio involving several friends who had access to the space. I went home early that night and came into the studio to witness the normal litter after the party, beer bottles, cigarette butts littered the floor, normal stuff. I wanted to start painting from a stack of small canvases that I had prepared before the summer travels, I was relishing the thump of prepped canvas over stretchers, something I don't use so much since the majority of my practice is on canvas stretched over wood panel.

I cleaned up and sent into my storage bay to select a new canvas and turned to the wall was a painting made apparently the night before, the tell tale magic marker of Henry Taylor and inchoate dabbling by others with less or no painterly skill, no doubt degraded by drink and smoke. I was pissed but I also know the unwritten rule being that there are no rules and friends have carte blanc to make whatever strikes their fancy and is sparked by inspiration. But this piece of art wasn't art yet, despite our era's credo that anything so nominated was art, it was clear to me that this one hadn't achieved that status, at least no one had nominated it so with a signature or a ceremonious hanging for contemplation. Strangely, it was instead hidden with it's face turned to the wall in my back room.

After a little time performing forensic analysis and enduring a mild frustration that a perfectly good canvas was molested, I scraped off the drunken dabs, leaving the compositional gesture that bore Henry Taylor's trademark image of two people in marker. I decided to make lemonade from the lemon, take on Henry's composition and make the painting mine again. I thought that perhaps I could learn something, perhaps this could be a start of something new.

The title was drawn from a blogpost noting the opening of Rowan Wood's show at Anne Marten's home in Echo Park. It felt like a fit.