While working on my adaptation of Jean Ray's Malpertuis, i made a lot of false starts with sequences just aimlessly prowling about the hallways & surrounding grounds of the eponymous mansion, taking atmosphere shots; most eventually ended up on the cutting room floor. These paintings are an attempt, in a sense, to have my cake after eating it, and consitute a kind of inverse prefatory sketches. There is a ( for my purposes at least ) crucial line in Ray's book- "When all these people are dead I will marry you"- and ideally the adaptation would have been a tour of the empty house after this union had been attained. But there were other considerations that prevailed.
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At one point i decided it would be nice to have the paintings reflect some of the German expressionist film aesthetic we all know & love so much, by 'tinting' them through the use of coloured plexiglass the way Dreyer and Murnau used tints for dream scenes. It would also neatly obscure the mark-making process of the paintings and give them a finish at odds with their looseness. But this brings with it the problem how to place the plexiglass over the painting; i would have to frame them & frames, as we all know, are old-fashioned and ungainly things. We look at things through other things all the time these days. We need less framing, not more.
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I remember when studying painting i frequently incurred the ire of my teachers by cropping, i.e. sawing off, the parts of the painting it didn't need. This, i was told, was not how to compose; i ought to have planned better. Go tell it to film editors or to novelists chopping up their third drafts. The way i see it, this is exactly what composition means.
