Jacob van Schalkwyk | Humdingers

“The fourteen works in oil that make up HUMDINGERS began in Cape Town but were all finished over a three-month period in Dowanhill, Glasgow where they benefitted from being exposed to greater calmness and a protracted second bout of autumn light. I began them by concentrating my productivity into painterly events inextricable from my inspiration. Over time, amplitude rather than amplification emerged as the major unintended consequence of tuning down my practise in this way. Gradually, I found the pitch between the tip of my instrument and the surface of the substrate with more clarity. I steadily grew my awareness of pulling, pushing, of dragging, of swiping and avoiding – not as isolated actions but as events occurring in consistent relation to my surroundings. In viewing and judging the surface generated by these events, I found them attenuated in varying degrees by the viscocity to which I had prepared the paint and mixed my colours. I began to play primarily with viscocity by limiting my colour palette and variety of marks until I felt a kind of resistance or gravity that I understand visually. Here, way out in space, I felt a sense of warmth like the heat generated by rubbing one’s hands together. I came to understand this visual warmth in the same way I understand the act of humming. By humming, either side of my wrists, my chest and my lips for example, felt more connected to a solar system of morphisms, energies, nodes and meridians that, eventually, became dissectable to me through repeated contact initiated by the action of painting. Finally, once again, I felt more in tune with art than all the things I see and feel today that I totally reject.” 

Jacob van Schalkwyk