Episode I: Bump | Cause, Effect and Aftermath: A Journey through Painting that Goes Bump in the Light

Matt Carey-Williams, Sandy Lane, Wiltshire, January 2024

I: GERMINATION

Stillness is easy to maintain.
What has not yet emerged is easy to prevent.
The brittle is easy to shatter.
The small is easy to scatter.
Solve it before it happens.
Order it before chaos emerges.

(Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 64, c. 400 BC)

Trypophobes, look away now, because this essay – and the Episode it dances with – teems with bumps. Bumps that develop from molecular flashes of the painter’s brush; lie dormant in secreted junctures obscured by archaeologies of abstraction, or gently froth in those granular idiosyncrasies quietly authoring a metamorphosis of the physiognomic into the gnomic. It’s a seed that serves to swing or sway the movement, direction, image, or index of a painting, infecting a range of different assertions voiced across the dissonant terrains of surface, action, mark, gesture, figure, intent, subject, and detail: all moments locked into a composition that, when attended, unlock the pattern of its presence and the epistemological entanglements they breed.

Bump makes for a hearty soup, with the paintings in this Episode making manifest the heady, electric variation of such jarring, twitchy germination. The bump can be the impossibly meticulously rendered hair of an eyelid; the elongated, evaporating sweep of a single brushstroke; the rumpus of one colour thwarting the harmony of its surrounding palette; the absence that replaces an expected presence. Bumps phrase painterly singularities, where nothing momentarily becomes something and vice versa, triggering compositions and their protagonists into various states of alarm, action and even ambiguity. They survive across spectra of expression, in plains both hyper-realistic and amoebic and care not for the forms and planes they influence. Whilst they may dislocate or discombobulate, bumps always seek to orchestrate the flux and fizz of a painted surface, simultaneously positioning and empowering themselves as cause, effect and aftermath of a composition’s mark, matter and meaning, leading it – and us – into the light.

Bump not only speaks to the interior of a pictorial surface but also to the inspirations, agitations, and celebrations an artist experiences when painting outside of it and which - wittingly and unwittingly - are carried by their brush, so that their work become 'scapes of synapses. Bumps nourished by mosaics of micro responses to the world in which these artists live, love and learn. It is inside these bumps – those that live in the artist’s head and jump like Donne’s flea onto their support in leaps of interrogation yet consolidation - that the DNA of a painter’s practice and language foams, bubbling to the surface as sign, then signifier, only to ebb back into the itch and architecture of the image or arrangement they permeate.

II: GESTATION

Everything is gestation and bringing forth. To let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth-hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artist’s life.

— (Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, 1929)

Ana Benaroya, Hot Shot, 2023, Oil on canvas, 119.4 x 101.6 cm (47 x 40 in)

Marius Bercea, Untitled (The One on the Right is on the Left), 2024, Oil on canvas, 70 x 60 cm (27 1/2 x 23 5/8 in)

Ana Benaroya, Hot Shot, 2023, Oil on canvas, 119.4 x 101.6 cm (47 x 40 in)

Marius Bercea, Untitled (The One on the Right is on the Left), 2024, Oil on canvas, 70 x 60 cm (27 1/2 x 23 5/8 in)

If the bump begins as a seed - be that an idea, a single lick of paint or an unconscious torque of frame or function – then it soon blossoms into its own visceral and visionary hieroglyph, forging direction and determination for the composition in which it operates. Many of these bumps thus provide moments of jubilant efflorescence that speak to a fecundity usually adumbrated by the female figure or, by extension, suggested by family gatherings. Ana Benaroya’s Hot Shot (2023) emerges from a cosmic nocturne in a blaze of bodybuilder tangerine. The sheer gravity of her orbicular form, together with the sensuous pugnacity that traces her Brobdingnagian musculature, should satisfy the most bump-hungry viewer. Note the figure’s erect nipples, amplifying Benaroya’s fantasy and gesture like exclamation marks and which ignites a bump that sashays between sex doll and Aphrodite, nourishing a desire born of flesh but which ends up, transcendent, in the stars above. The magical fertility of Benaroya’s goddess sits at odds with the gentle ordinariness of Marius Bercea’s Untitled (The One on the Right is on the Left) (2023). Yet this relatively calm cluster of boys – a family of their own making – purrs with bumps. Bercea’s youthful huddle is sandwiched between two sets of opulent, dark curtains; repoussoir that function to unveil their incandescent interconnection. Yet it is here that the painting’s bumps begin to swell because the artist has deliberately thrust the group to the very front of the picture plane, refusing to offer any sense of recession or perspective and negating the repoussoir’s function. So close are the figures that they almost physically connect with the viewer outside looking in, even as none of them confront us. Haptics are thus disturbed but now made even less certain by an optic that dissolves and fluidifies surface and structure when it should prop up an architecture of being. The bump here breathing in those diaphanous shimmers of white and red that obfuscate Bercea’s boys at the bottom of the composition. A bump that, likewise, agitates because it punctures the political binary of ‘left’ and ‘right’, with such rupture haunting Bercea’s diorama of innocence about to be lost.

Dean Fox, The Artists, 2023, Oil on canvas, 79 x 63 cm (31 1/8 x 243/4 in)

Clare Woods, Knot, 2023, Oil on Aluminium, 70 x 70 cm (27 1/2 x 27 1/2 in)

Dean Fox, The Artists, 2023, Oil on canvas, 79 x 63 cm (31 1/8 x 243/4 in)

Clare Woods, Knot, 2023, Oil on Aluminium, 70 x 70 cm (27 1/2 x 27 1/2 in)

As the pregnant body billows, so does the forest flourish with thickened foliage or the flower luxuriate in deeper colours and more graceful design. Yet just as the body must yield to the bump that grows within so, too, must the floral and verdure concede to its inevitable bump. Dean Fox’s The Artists (2023) sings as a glorious coalescence of figure and ground, propelled by his searching brush loaded with jades, sapphires, and aquamarines. The bump sits at the heart of this synthesis: at the point where a woman, about to sit at a picnic table under the cool cover of a coppice, is caught in Fox’s vortex of paint and preoccupation and is subsumed by her sylvan environment: an abduction we barely see given the artist’s darting eye and painterly panache. A moment where the protagonist becomes the action; the artists become their (and Fox’s) art. Quicker, still, is the equally slick mutation of paint into pattern and then light one finds in Clare Woods’ Knot (2023). This knotted purple rose – an emblematic entanglement of love at first sight and commitment – offers a paradigm of passion and promise yet even the bounty of Woods’ sumptuous image and generous signification begins with a bump. The liquid swish of her body as it urgently fleshes out the flower’s shape across her aluminium support – wet on wet – invites those tiny parasites of chance and accident to settle upon her surface. And there it is, a tiny purple heart – a mouche stolen from Marie Antoinette’s cheek - resting at upper left on the periphery of the image. Guiding, illuminating, energising, and perhaps even controlling the serous flummox of Woods’ image and ground.

For all its etymological elasticity, ‘bumping’ had a very specific definition in Elizabethan times. To bump with another was, of course, to fuck them. Shakespeare – the great poet of that era – was oft known for turning a verb (and all its adjectival elan) into a noun and fucking around with grammar so, when in Romeo and Juliet (first published in 1597), Nurse chuckles as she recounts Juliet’s horrified reaction (as told to her mother, Lady Capulet) of preparing for motherhood at just 14 years old, Shakespeare describes Juliet’s shock as “A bump as big as a cockerel’s stone” (I, iii, 56): one that would come from a fall on her face inspirited by a most unwanted (but inevitable) fall on her back.

Glen Pudvine, Squatting in Head, 2024, Oil on linen, 180 x 150 cm (70 7/8 x 59 in)

Antony Micallef, Self-Portrait after Giacometti, 2021-23, Oil and beeswax on linen, 132 x 110 cm (52 x 43 1/4 in)

Glen Pudvine, Squatting in Head, 2024, Oil on linen, 180 x 150 cm (70 7/8 x 59 in)

Antony Micallef, Self-Portrait after Giacometti, 2021-23, Oil and beeswax on linen, 132 x 110 cm (52 x 43 1/4 in)

Phrasing ‘bump’ and ‘cock’ in the same sentence was a quite deliberate strategy of Shakespeare’s. From their lexical admix emerges a protuberance both libidinal and, it would seem, threatening. It is from that charge that one finds the bump sizzle then deliberately fizzle in Glen Pudvine’s Squatting in Head (2024). Channelling Bret Easton Ellis’ antihero, Patrick Bateman, from his 1991 novel, American Psycho, Pudvine’s self-portrait doggedly confronts his viewer whilst squatting, exercising with a kettlebell. The symmetry of his yogic pose exudes a curiously saintly frisson, at once bellicose yet vulnerable, and which serves to highlight his bump: an accentuation, however, that deflates rather than inflates any sense of ego given its flaccidity. This test of stamina and the subsequent cross-examination of a phallocentricity that warps Bateman’s emotional quotient, leaving him bereft of any comprehension of or compliance with value, is played out by Pudvine against a diagrammatic background of a head, gridded and directed to map out proportionate perfection. It’s a search for ultimate physical, perhaps masculine prowess, executed in the shadow of a bump-cum-god that delineates a wish fulfilment never to be concluded. A bankruptcy that would plague Bateman’s demons but which, ironically, leaves Pudvine delightfully nonplussed, setting up the painting’s curious anagrammatic thump. Given that this trial of self takes place inside a head (whether Pudvine’s, Bateman’s, ours or another’s remains unclear) the artist cleverly flips his viewer from certainty to uncertainty. We swing from the clarity of confident self-assertion to the inner secrets of a monologic introspection, fraught by the fear of not ‘fitting in’, that welcome those voices inside your head telling you to murder a homeless man because your friend has a thicker, more tasteful business card than you. With a watermark.

This ambiguity of expression is shared by Antony Micallef’s Self-Portrait after Giacometti (2021-23). Now the bump, once perfuming the air of Pudvine’s theatre of absurd fragility, takes on its own dynamic form. It’s gestation at such a point that it now clambers out of its two-dimensional cave in sculptural defiance of itself as a painting. Against a mottled background, bearing the scars of its own becoming, Micallef’s likeness, although painted, appears as if cast in bronze by the Swiss master himself. Yet this extraordinary painterly plasticity is, indeed, achieved with pure oil – shaped, folded and dried over many months – and then carefully constructed on the surface to imitate the patina of Giacometti’s bronzes. Just as confrontational, symmetrical, deliberately opaque yet decidedly driven by a design both physical and psychological as Pudvine’s pose, Micallef’s self-portrait bears the dark fruit of a fertility that once evinced, then proposed but now resounds in the torturous glory of its seductive realisation.

III: EXPECTATION

Whatever it is you’re seeking won’t come in the form you’re expecting.

– Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 2002

Once brewed, the spell of the bump drifts across its host in melodies of pregnant possibility. It rides the peaks and troughs of Savannah Marie Harris’ ebullient abstraction, visible in her energetic splashes or the traces charmed by her oily curlicues as they carve their way through her sandy ground.

Savannah Harris, Rocky, 2024, Oil paint, oil stick, sand on canvas, 70 x 45 cm (27 1/2 x 17 3/4 in)

Haroun Hayward, A Painting for Graham Sutherland and Model 500 (Cornstook in Landscape), 2024, Oil, oil stick, oil pastel on wooden panel, 94 x 63 cm (37 x 24 3/4 in)

Savannah Harris, Rocky, 2024, Oil paint, oil stick, sand on canvas, 70 x 45 cm (27 1/2 x 17 3/4 in)

Haroun Hayward, A Painting for Graham Sutherland and Model 500 (Cornstook in Landscape), 2024, Oil, oil stick, oil pastel on wooden panel, 94 x 63 cm (37 x 24 3/4 in)

Harris’ Untitled (2023) fizzes with bumpy energy, the result of her choreography of gesture and ground, glaze, and colour, that, in its richness of texture and text, sets up so many opportunities to identify the bump. Haroun Hayward’s paintings act in a similar fashion with his tessellation of repeated – remixed – ‘scapes, both recollected and collected, serving to create a kind of aesthetic and experiential mantra which turns the act of looking into a visual chant. Night Drive Through Babylon (Cornstook in Landscape) (2024) marries the name of a seminal techno track by the pioneer Detroit DJ, Model 500 (Juan Atkins) with a Welsh landscape painting by Graham Sutherland from the 1930’s. Hayward has used the same track as part of a title for several previous paintings, lending further credence to his strategy of remixing. One would expect the discordance between the two passages – one dryly etched as a nocturnal form of painterly intaglio; the other lusciously executed in creamy, amber drafts of bright pigment – to ready the viewer for the announcement of Hayward’s bump. Yet the bump lies here not in diversity but in the artist’s consistent repetition of his soft geometric circuit boards; the viscous ‘embroidered’ circles of the Suzani at lower right, and the two vignettes of Sutherland’s painting, sliced then stubbed and now turned into tickets allowing entry into Hayward’s mellifluous, raspy surface that prickles with indexical propensity.

Where the goosebumps of expectation really start to surge is in some of the quieter figurative works that, in their excruciating and intoxicating fidelity, provide an operating theatre in which the slightest twist is amplified beyond measure. Upon first appearance, Marc Dennis’ Wicked (2023) would seem to have exorcised itself of any impish bumps. One need not dive too deep, however, before the bump rises to the surface. In a lavish room, reeking of old money, antique furniture sits on hushed, polished floors while old master paintings promenade across expensive flock wallpaper. As one takes in the paintings the first bump occurs at the end of that observation. To the right of a Rembrandt self-portrait a canvas is missing, with just an empty frame hung on the wall. This absence follows an act of abject thievery because this beautiful room belongs to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. A room raided by thieves who infamously stole thirteen works of art from the museum in 1990; a crime still yet to be solved. Wicked because of the heinous crime; wicked because it occurred in Boston where that word is commonly used as an adverb, replacing the word ‘very’. A ‘wicked’ wicked crime, indeed. This bump is not alone, though. Another accompanies it and it is this one that fires the gravity of the painting’s expectation. Follow the light from the main room, through the doorway and into a corridor. Then follow that shaft of light, maculated by a shadowy presence that once was, and glide back into the far distance where a room is only visible through a cracked door. Dennis cleverly articulates not just the theft but the escape route of those who stole these works and does so – ironically - with both those agentsin absentia, and an exit articulated by the positivity of light. In so doing the act of theft and the loss it has illuminated is made ever more poignant as Ms. Stewart Gardner’s room continues to tremble with embourgeoised disquiet.

Marc Dennis, Wicked, 2023, Oil on linen, 111.8 x 149.9 cm (44 x 59 in)

Andrew Sendor, Solvej with Casparina and Jensyne at the Labrador Sea, 2023-24, Oil on matte white Plexiglas, walnut wood, in tiger maple Artist’s frame, Framed: 57.8 x 47 cm (22 3/4 x 18 1/2 in)

Marc Dennis, Wicked, 2023, Oil on linen, 111.8 x 149.9 cm (44 x 59 in)

Andrew Sendor, Solvej with Casparina and Jensyne at the Labrador Sea, 2023-24, Oil on matte white Plexiglas, walnut wood, in tiger maple Artist’s frame, Framed: 57.8 x 47 cm (22 3/4 x 18 1/2 in)

A different type of horripilation occurs when confronted by the work of Andrew Sendor. Executed on white Plexiglas and inset into a tiger maple frame, Sendor’s pensive, pulchritudinous painting, Solvej with Casparina and Jensyne at the Labrador Sea (2023-24), continues a sequence of paintings that tell the artist’s own labyrinthine novella; an imagined narrative involving a troupe of players out of which he selects certain vignettes to describe in paint. Even before his first brushstroke, the bump of expectation hums in the laborious preparation he makes, hiring actors to play his characters; filming and photographing them in costumes he has designed. Only once his character is fully realised will Sendor begin to finesse a surface of such vivid realism that, only upon the closest inspection, will it wobble with planar refraction and distraction, ‘bumped’ – as image – by its monochromaticity and the stark, white borders that edge any hope of ultimate plasticity. Who Solvej, Casparina and Jensyne are is not of paramount importance. Bumps care not for specific individuals. However, these fictitious identities set up a stage, rich with potential, that nurture Sendor’s bumps and the tributaries of signification and expectation that flow from it like a delta of hope and prospect. Far more than mere tronies, these characters – and the dramas in which they are locked – function as visual fugues, conducting Sendor’s own melody of paint and his delectable harmonisation of manner, program, and design.

IV: EXHILARATION

– Emily Dickinson, Exhilaration is the Breeze
That lifts us from the Ground
And leaves us in another place
Whose statement is not found –

Exhilaration is the Breeze, first published in 1914

Rob & Nick Carter, Transforming Landscape Painting, 2013-2017, Monitor with player framed, TRT: 2hrs 30 mins, Framed: 99 x 81 x 13 cm (39 x 31 7/8 x 5 1/8 in), Edition 5 of 12 + 5 APs

From the calm and into the storm, the bump’s journey turns towards its inexorable fusillade of form and meaning. This burst comes in a kaleidoscope of colours and kinetics, transforming the landscape of our understanding of painting, both phenomenologically and notionally. Such transubstantiation finds its apogee in a painting that isn’t – technically – a painting yet remains an object steadfastly committed to unpicking the mechanics and vernacular of that discipline. Rob and Nick Carter are artists (and life partners) whose practice engages with photography, film, video, digital, cybernated expression and even robotics. In each of these curricula the artists seek merely to capture light – the elementary unit of painting – and to explore how such a sequester can both chime with and inveigh against the image that arrested light produces; to view light’s monadic state both atomically then ionically. Since everyone and everything are all made up of the same carbon, exploded billions of light years ago and chameleonically shaped through epochs of mutation, so does Rob and Nick’s project carry this rather fitting poesy. Transforming Landscape Painting (2013-17) looks like a painting by John Constable and is even framed in a beautiful antique frame fit for an ‘Old Master’. However, Rob and Nick’s painting is not made up of brushstrokes but of pixels. Over two and a half hours a monitor very slowly plays their digital manipulation of Constable’s Study for Cornfield (c. 1871, London, Tate Britain). Dickinson’s breeze gently wafts through the trees as it quietly stirs the cloudscape above (the sky being Nature’s great source of light that governs all, according to Constable). Rob and Nick’s bump colours both their object and process with both trajectories generating a state of delighted surprise in their viewer.

Bumps love to double-drop disco biscuits of exhilaration and, often, that bump of euphoria is accompanied by tectonic shifts of substance and surface. Conor Harrington’s A Bruising Return After The Burn (2024) dynamically records that joyous, yet sibylline arc. An older man, elegantly attired in the exquisite costume of an eighteenth-century libertine, concentrates intently on unfurling a string of bunting. It is a suitably strange enough image to already divine the bumps from within. Harrington, however, throws his figure into an abstract ‘scape, agitated by drips and smears, scorched by furious notes of fiery orange, addled yet activated by a chorus of accidents, and it is in this combat – this flux – that the bump finds its happy, hallucinogenic place. Just as the figure attempts to make sense of the tangled knot of bunting, so does the painting attempt to both seize and separate the entanglement of abstraction and figuration that invigorates Harrington’s surface with an almost feral force.

Conor Harrington, A Bruising Return After The Burn, 2024, Oil and spray paint on linen, 150 x 200 cm (59 x 78 3/4 in)

Jessie Makinson, Poor Little Fools, 2024, Oil on canvas, 195 x 165 cm (76 3/4 x 65 in)

Conor Harrington, A Bruising Return After The Burn, 2024, Oil and spray paint on linen, 150 x 200 cm (59 x 78 3/4 in)

Jessie Makinson, Poor Little Fools, 2024, Oil on canvas, 195 x 165 cm (76 3/4 x 65 in)

If Harrington’s bump doesn’t quite affect a transmogrification of his subject, then Jessie Makinson’s certainly does. Makinson’s Poor Little Fools (2024) positively bounces with bumps, triggered by the enigma of the diorama she fashions to project an anonymous scene as uncanny as it is alluring, and which is amplified by a tantalising perspectival inconsistency. Makinson’s divine creatures are inspired by the exotica and erotica of Anne Serre’s The Governesses (1992): a delectable, darkly cryptic fairy tale of three young women, living in a large mansion, who are charged with the task of educating a group of boys there but, instead, linger and malinger between moments of melancholic ennui and tempestuous, ‘Saltburned’ lust. Both the figures and the narrative of abandon they follow cohere with yet resist the frames that compose their action, so that the bump now meddles with the very fabric of space, akin to those gentle spatial wobbles we see in the art of Northern Netherlandish icons Memling or Campin. Having interrupted space, the bump now mutes and mutates time: are we millions of years in the future or eons in the past? The final, fabulous bump is reserved for Makinson’s extravagant protagonists and their ambiguous synergy between states human and zoological. In the background a supine figure awaits attention, their form beginning at least hominid but then tailing off into a shape both serpentine and ichthyic. Likewise, the foreground is occupied by two figures, both blessed with long red hair, one of whom is wrapped in haunting gauze, the other covered almost entirely in an opulent fur. Makinson’s bumps forge the very dynamo of her opera and ornamentation, directing space, time, and characterisation, weaving between cognizant humanity and unconscious ferality; between horizons primordial and futuristic and which lead us to a destiny both dystopic and utopic as we clamour for another of her prismatic bumps, desperate to keep her vibe alive.

Christian Rex van Minnen, Griefs Means Pleasures Ends, 2024, Oil on Linen, 243.8 x 157.5 cm (96 x 62 in)

It is at the crescendo of exaltation that the bump turns into a bang. That moment where sense is suspended and repossessed by a synaesthesia that turns colour into sound; darkness into light; optics into haptics. Christian Rex van Minnen’s explosive Griefs Means Pleasures Ends (2024) captures the bump’s mutation from arc to act in a stunning spectacle both frabjous and frumious. The latter two words being nonsense words invented by Lewis Carroll which, lexically and semiotically, both frustrate and amuse, resounding onomatopoetically: an experience not unlike the one van Minnen’s bonkers bouquets beget. The bump starts as something familiar – a vase of flowers – but then wobbles into its psychedelic ecstasy - arrangement becoming estrangement - as one notes that the petals of the flowers have become sticky, translucent gummies (themselves the key to several Huxleian doors), some of which assume recognisable forms, some of which are tattooed, others of which sit comfortably in their deliciously blobby, incandescent bumpiness. Van Minnen presents the bump as the agent of his high surrealism – a visual glossolalia – that dreamily unveils itself because of and despite the geometric, spatial architecture provided by Ambrosius Bosschaert’s Vase of Flowers in a Window (1618, The Hague, Mauritshuis). The result is a gesture and act that punches through the scaffold of structure and frees an id and idiom that allows both artist and viewer to play out their own paradox. Resistance to the bump is futile. When it wants to blow, it blows.

V: COLLISION

There are some galaxies that not only teach us things but are just gorgeously beautiful to look at. My favourite example is the Antenne, which is a pair of colliding galaxies.

– Sandra Faber, Interview on Nova, PBS Station, 2004

Just as the impact the bump generates can be an act of painterly, pyrotechnic self-combustion, so too can that impact be registered as the thunderclap of two opposites meeting in binary banditry. The collision may be easily recognisable. Marc Dennis’ Allegory of All That’s Wrong with the World (2022) depicts his version of Claude Monet’s Argenteuil Basin with a Single Sailboat (1874) after it had been punched by a visitor at Dublin’s National Gallery of Ireland. The curiously shapely geometry of the puncture sitting at odds with the fluffy strokes of Monet’s impressionism. Likewise, another work inspired by another of art history’s favoured sons, Flora Yukhnovich’s Study (2024) zings with a lustrous turbulence of painted marks scrambling together as if caught in a strong headwind to evince Titian’s Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-23, London, National Gallery). Each individual mark visibly presses into another, like thirsty cells intent on reproduction. So it is that Yukhnovich’s work is a veritable maelstrom of bumps, with each tiny collision acting like a precious mosaic tile – tessellating yet testing surface and source – and the outcome a treasured augenblick that wormholes the past into the future, fuelled by a fission of tongues presentational and representational.

Marc Dennis, Allegory of All That's Wrong with the World, 2022, Oil on linen, 86.4 x 86.4 cm (34 x 34 in)

Flora Yukhnovich, Study, 2023, Oil on paper, 15 x 21 cm (5 7/8 x 8 1/4 in)

Marc Dennis, Allegory of All That's Wrong with the World, 2022, Oil on linen, 86.4 x 86.4 cm (34 x 34 in)

Flora Yukhnovich, Study, 2023, Oil on paper, 15 x 21 cm (5 7/8 x 8 1/4 in)

The deeper one dives into the index of a painting, the more fulminant and consequential the collision. Rachel Howard’s process is one that deliberately sets up gladiatorial combat between several binary units: duels for the duality of invention versus the originate of Nature; fights between those marks initiated and those that gravity dictates, with all this painterly polemic reigned and released by the push-pull of Howard’s concept and execution. Go By The Forest (2023) elegantly describes the battlefield at stake. A navy throb of sky, impregnated with a gentle squall of marks, achieved by pressing fabric against a wet surface, floats down the canvas. The penumbra of this blue fog then bleeds down against a sunny, fleshy ground in linear rivulets like moody, winter rain. These striations firstly confront a nebulous puff of verdant green, equally permeated with a pattern that looks like trees and which ultimately is then devoured by the cadmium darkness and mystery of the forest. The forest – specifically – that Russian men were told to hide in so they could avoid being conscripted for Russia’s war with Ukraine. Two colours. Two patterns. Two agencies. Both ready to fight. The bump of Howard’s painting both prefigures and postscripts a collision that we see about to happen yet know has already happened, leaving her viewer floating in a temporal warp beguiled by the menace of her miasma and the beauty such bumps betray.

Rachel Howard, Go By the Forest, 2023, Acrylic, oil and archival marker pen on canvas, 243.8 x 213.4 cm (96 x 84 in)

Jin Meyerson, 1985, 2023-24, Oil and acrylic emulsion on canvas, 200 x 300 cm (78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in)

Rachel Howard, Go By the Forest, 2023, Acrylic, oil and archival marker pen on canvas, 243.8 x 213.4 cm (96 x 84 in)

Jin Meyerson, 1985, 2023-24, Oil and acrylic emulsion on canvas, 200 x 300 cm (78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in)

The multidimensional, galactic yet nanoscopic bumps that articulate the chaos and temporal, conceptual and painterly collisions of Jin Meyerson’s work are clearly at play in his monumental 1985 (2024). A frequency of space is achieved through the artist’s constant interrogation of his given image – a sequence of infinite abbreviations then replications – whereby a single image can sustain yet kill itself like the ouroboros. This vibration – of sign and sight – might be born from a loaded discombobulation but it is one that seeks equilibrium. Meyerson’s universe of colliding bumps speaks paradigmatically and paradoxically to the travails of his own bumpy life. One that began in Korea, abandoned then rescued, nurtured in America and which now has returned to Korea refreshed, if not resurrected. Like the visual experience of giving oneself over to his painting, Meyerson’s life has been coloured by the rhythmic flux of circumstances and the collisions off which such kismet feeds. This explains the painting’s title. The year after Orwell’s dystopic tale of truth and those who control and abuse it, 1985 refers specifically to the Korean student protests of that year, notably the three-day occupation of the USIS library in Seoul between 23 and 26 May by the student organisation called the Sanmin Struggle Committee. The tapestry of happenstances continues to stitch meaning together for Meyerson as his wife, Sunil, was born on 28 June 1985. The very same day, in 1976, that the artist left Korea to live with his adoptive parents. As the Indian poet, Sanober Khan attests, “Your hand touching mine, this is how galaxies collide.”

VI: DECELERATION

Slow motion gets you there faster.

– Attributed to Hoagy Carmichael; no source

A bump can check and cultivate; frustrate yet animate. Likewise, it can speed up a composition’s tempo, shifting easily between gears adagio and largo, slowing the pace of a painting right down like a sleeping policeman (as speed bumps are known in Britain). This slower speed often chimes with a more methodical, laborious process. One that takes each single (often minute) mark one agonising brushstroke at a time. Mathew Weir’s paintings emerge from such a mentally as well as physically demanding routine. What appears to be mottled or modelled is, in fact, the product of an almost psychotically regimented litany of single daubs, with individual colours achieving the sensation of being blended or mixed purely by their microscopic juxtaposition or contradistinction. Weir’s bump, then, provides a kind of purgatory for his marks, suspended between an earthly pedestrianism and a celestial coalescence and thus omnipotence, desperate for connection yet ever segregated. That purgatory seeps into the significance of Weir’s Hellmouth I (2019-24). Set inside an abundant autumnal woodland, a giant ursine creature, belching flames of hellish fire, devours an assortment of the woods’ creatures, fed to it by its protective demons. Inspired by numerous illuminated manuscripts, Weir makes clear the medieval association between mouths and Hell and which, by extension, chimes with the notion that his process somehow reflects this purgatorial bump. Being eaten alive is a slow process of deathly transformation and, just like the Damned destined for Hell, their status – neither dead nor alive – speaks to the dynamic of Weir’s careful construction and delicate deconstruction, one painterly pathogen at a time. It’s only when the mosaic is complete that the sign begins to signify in jubilant orchestration. Until then Weir’s brush follows his map, heads for the light, and orienteers it one mark, one bump at a time.

Mathew Weir, Hellmouth I, 2019-2024, Oil on canvas mounted on board, Unframed: 49 x 34.5 cm (19 1/4 x 13 5/8 in)

Hettie Inniss, Imposter, 2023, Oil, pigment and sand on linen, 70 x 50 cm (27 1/2 x 19 3/4 in)

Mathew Weir, Hellmouth I, 2019-2024, Oil on canvas mounted on board, Unframed: 49 x 34.5 cm (19 1/4 x 13 5/8 in)

Hettie Inniss, Imposter, 2023, Oil, pigment and sand on linen, 70 x 50 cm (27 1/2 x 19 3/4 in)

Hettie Inniss’ Imposter (2023) delights with shadowy patterns of silhouetted deceit created by a presence which never was. A sabulous, quiet undulation of rose and orange becomes a petri dish for Inniss’ fermentation of her casual scatter of black shapes; forms that suggest, evoke, and even inspire the viewer to recall memories that bulge on the edge of our conscious or simply never were. The bump here sits in that gap – between remembered and invented; between known and unknown – and which breeds in Inniss’ viewer feelings of displacement and schism. The artist thus offers her viewer the opportunity to pick up the shards of this fragmented narrative and, like the imposter, piece them together to create an alternative reality.

James White, Indoor Nature, 2022, Oil and varnish on acrylic faced panel in Perspex box frame, 140 x 170 x 7 cm (55 1/8 x 66 7/8 x 2 3/4 in)

If Weir’s surface seemingly waits endlessly and patiently for its conclusion and Inniss’ revels as a plasmic plane capable of morphing into any number of possible ‘truths’, then James White’s objects deliver sermons of phenomenology even as the layers of their prosaic objecthood slowly give way to the poetry of his intent and aesthetic, conceptual administration. Indoor Nature (2022) is an object replete with oxymorons and it this contradiction that presses pause – deliberately so - on White’s work. Firstly, Nature, by definition, cannot be indoors. Here a yucca plant – that solitary whiff of Nature for many a young city dweller’s apartment – is placed against a window, grateful for the little light it provides. An oval mirror sits next to it, offering a reflection of the plant and which, in turn, houses the object’s bump. One can feel the melancholy yet allure of Narcissus in this work. Just as the beautiful Narcissus lamented his inability to physically meet himself, forced to make do with just his rippling reflection in the river, so too does the plant seem to sigh a sense of loss, indicated in the abbreviated reflection and its lower leaves beginning to droop. The act of looking – the gaze as both reflection and inflection – thus provides the second and third oxymoron because what we look at is, of course, not a reflection and, furthermore, both technically and conceptually, not even a painting. The varnished image is painted in grisaille to look like the artist’s photograph it so faithfully describes. However, the hegemony of that image is disrupted by a thin white stripe that runs along the bottom edge. Further severance occurs when one observes the object in the round. The image is executed on an acrylic faced panel which the artist has deliberately left raw on its visibly corrugated sides. The object and its image are then, finally, encased in a large, tight Perspex box frame, serving to plasticize the viewer’s entire experience of White’s object but also – just like Nature weakened by the indoors, just like Narcissus’ oxymoronic self-denial – obviate its status as a painting yet empower itself as a reservoir of multi-laminated possibilities, probing object, subject and their ongoing quarrel of status hissing in between.

VII: DEFORMATION

Art is significant deformity.

– Roger Fry quoted in Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry: A Biography, 1940)

Ana Benaroya, Tonight You Belong to Me, 2023, Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 119.4 cm (40 x 47 in)

Antony Micallef, Portrait of Francis Bacon, 2023, Oil on linen, 71 x 63 cm (28 x 24 3/4 in)

Ana Benaroya, Tonight You Belong to Me, 2023, Oil on canvas, 101.6 x 119.4 cm (40 x 47 in)

Antony Micallef, Portrait of Francis Bacon, 2023, Oil on linen, 71 x 63 cm (28 x 24 3/4 in)

If the car hits the bump and the subsequent crash, merely seconds long, is experienced by the passenger in slow motion then the moments that follow – shock and injury – engender a shift in that person, both physical and emotional, that can haunt them for a lifetime. Which leads us to the easiest bumps to find in paintings and which, for many, are the most satisfying. Ana Benaroya’s Tonight You Belong to Me (2023) transforms her teal-skinned reclining female nude into a rolling landscape of hills and valleys, forging a squishy, generous geology of desire. The amplification of the form – and the libidinal thrust it thus booms – is just one of many bumps Benaroya embraces in her body of work. Likewise, Antony Micallef’s Portrait of Francis Bacon (2023) dazzles with the immediacy of its denatured physiognomy (the artist quoting both his subject and his subject’s own creative devices). But where Benaroya’s hyperbole speaks of luscious voluptuousness and insatiable desire, Micallef’s head – and the dynamic of its deforming – sets up a different kind of bump. This is a painting that pangs in its contrast between an almost evanescent ground of thin, shimmering glazes and a plasticized passage of furious abstract marks, built up over considerable time, literally hanging off the edge for dear life, that summon Bacon’s aura like a necromancer. Micallef’s deformation is not limited just to the requirements of his image. It reverberates throughout his practice; one that has always interrogated the parameters of form and Nature, subjecting those pillars of presence and truth to the dynamo and magic of his eye and hand. Micallef’s bump is not the deformed outcome; it is the evolution and performance such deformation requires and his undying commitment to it.

Sara Birns, Coalescence of a Wholesome Adrenaline Junkie, 2024, Oil paint and oil pastel on linen, 182.9 x 137.2 cm (72 x 54 in)

Of all the artists in Bump, it is Sara Birns whose work – and bump - illuminates the power, mystery, and tragicomedy of contortion, disproportion, and warp. For Birns beauty lies not in symmetry or scale, not in verisimilitude or accuracy, but in the blemish, the askew and the grotesque. Consequently, Birns’ work doesn’t so much radiate with bumps but becomes the very bump that governs its shape and mien. Coalescence of a Wholesome Adrenaline Junkie (2024) is dominated by the exaggerated yet clipped presence of a laughing face, staring up and out of the picture plane in joyous exclamation and, perhaps, relief. Maybe this person has just completed a bungee jump or some other adrenaline-inducing activity. Once the viewer gets past the excitement lit in their eyes and holding their mouth wide open, the figure, upon reflection, begins to sound darker notes. It’s here where the bump begins to boil. Hyperbole, now, strikes a different chord with the magnification of her sun-kissed, highly wrought head, bursting beyond the confines of the pictorial space, suggesting an alacrity for freedom. The close-up also magnifies Birns’ confrontation, so that her in-your-face gesture suggests not just a bump of celebration but perhaps a moment of crisis: that’s happened, is happening or one about to unfold. The diminutive body, supplicant and passive as it sits on the floor, nervously playing with their hair and seemingly about to get up, supports such a line of thought. The coalescence at play is therefore the fusion of these two possibilities, both born from the deformation of the human figure, merging the light of the wholesome with the shadows of the worrisome. One that makes you want to jump again; the other that makes you want to jump away with both bumps consciously eschewing reality in favour of that bigger bump and it higher state of consciousness that both numb yet electrify.

VIII: PROGRESSION

The greater the obstacle, the more glory in overcoming it.

– Molière, Amphityron, 1668

Savannah Harris, Mercurial, 2024, Oil paint, oil stick, sand on canvas, 200 x 190 cm (78 3/4 x 74 3/4 in)

Aldous Huxley, who was partial to the odd bump or two, once wrote that the task of art was to ‘protest against the horrible inclemency of life’ (Antic Hay, 1923). That protest materialises in a myriad number of ways across the language of painting. Some painters seek solace in beauty; others charge their anger with controversy that aims to challenge its viewer. Any of these strategies must contend with several bumps – obstacles in the artist’s path – which, when negotiated, enable the painter to make their breakthrough, physically and philosphically. Many of the abstract painters in the Episode face several hurdles as they square up to their painting. The schema of Savannah Marie Harris’ Untitled (2024) lies in the interplay of her skirmishing planes of colour with her belligerent, investigative line. This is managed and then realised by the artist’s continual layering and glazing until the surface begins to sing to her. Harris tends well her tilled soil, offering moments of inherent optical temptation fired by grain and gesticulation, but also suspicion, as her agitated brush breathes fibre and funk into her juicy, intuitive ground of ferment and foment. Just as the artist ploughs through her composition so must her viewer plough on until, finally – and gloriously – Harris’ surface begins to sound its extraordinary ululations of colour and light.

The equally inquisitive line of Dean Fox zooms around his surface intent on investing in it the sanctity only delineation brings. Yet much of Fox’s practice boils down to his ability to let that line govern then genuflect to the potency of pure paint. His The Journey After Gauguin(2024) sees line meandering in, out and through lozenges of inchoate forms; in so doing it electrifies such passages into life, triggering flora, fauna and figures into agitated signification. Fox’s creative arc is not an act of osmosis but one of defibrillation. Any bump that stands in his way is jolted into life – and maybe a different life than he had previously imagined – by his incessant quest for an abstraction that communicates like figuration. A similar disdain for anything that would hinder process and progress is shared by Rachel Howard. We see this so clearly in the jewel-like Station Eleven (2020); a work made during lockdown which is inspired by an open gate, close to her home, that opens out onto a field. It’s a simple subject but one which Howard, nonetheless, lends dramatic impact to not because of a line, but because of her resolute conviction as a painter who loves to test not just her faculty but the very limits of the medium itself. Paint is brushed and pulled, pushed and poured onto her surface in dynamic, visceral acts that still manage to skipper blocks of structure between bolts of delicious spontaneity. Bumps for the painter are like moguls to the skier: they make the run more difficult – a bit more dangerous - but so much more fun and rewarding.

Dean Fox, The Journey After Gauguin, 2024, Oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm (78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in)

Rachel Howard, Station Eleven, 2020, Oil on linen, 61 x 50.8 cm (24 x 20 in)

Dean Fox, The Journey After Gauguin, 2024, Oil on canvas, 200 x 300 cm (78 3/4 x 118 1/8 in)

Rachel Howard, Station Eleven, 2020, Oil on linen, 61 x 50.8 cm (24 x 20 in)

IX: ILLUMINATION

Things that go ‘bump’ in the night
Should not really give one a fright.
It’s the hole in each ear
That lets in the fear,
That, and the absence of light!

– Spike Milligan, Bump, from Four Spikey Poems, 1972

Our final bump is a fist bump: a moment of camaraderie and celebration. All the artists in this Episode arbitrate with many of the bumps this journey has uncovered; their compromise, in turn, affirming their own unique voice, passion, and style. The aching sophistication of Haroun Hayward’s painting beats differently to the osculating caress of Clare Woods’ brush. The gentle efflorescence of Hettie Inniss’ inceptive forms differs greatly from the ultra-definition of Andrew Sendor’s figures and yet both make paintings that engage with a similar bump: that of the status of the image and the frisson it generates as it oscillates between memory and imagination. Bump is a presentation that deliberately embraces a rainbow of painting styles and techniques, providing as rich and bumpy a journey as possible for the viewer. It is also worth quickly noting that many of the artists in the Episode engage with art from bygone eras. No less than sixteen works directly quote the work of other artists suggesting that bumps have been around for a very long time and that today’s painters often turn to the Renaissance, the Baroque, Impressionism or Modernism to help them navigate such choppy waters and, ultimately, make better sense of today by better understanding yesterday and the bumps those times instigated.

Marius Bercea, Art Students Enlightened by the Light of Inspiration, 2024, Oil on canvas, 215 x 190 cm (84 5/8 x 74 3/4 in)

Clare Woods, Dead Loop, 2023, Oil on aluminium, 70 x 70 cm (27 1/2 x 27 1/2 in)

Marius Bercea, Art Students Enlightened by the Light of Inspiration, 2024, Oil on canvas, 215 x 190 cm (84 5/8 x 74 3/4 in)

Clare Woods, Dead Loop, 2023, Oil on aluminium, 70 x 70 cm (27 1/2 x 27 1/2 in)

Bump – and this essay – attempts to chronicle a journey through contemporary painting that, in the final analysis, brings us to the light: that illumination of wonder, spectacle, thought and craft that marks the great joy of painting. It’s a sparkle we see in the greasy creases of Birns’ cheeks and the iridescent sheen of van Minnen’s vascular, testicular gummy bears. It’s a love we find in the subtle diffuse light that models Bercea’s figures so serenely and yet with such emotional intensity. It’s in the traces made by Dennis’ burglar and the digital modulation of Constable’s clouds so cleverly manipulated by Rob and Nick Carter. It’s the effervescence of an opalescent light dashing across Flora Yukhnovich’s small stages or lingering, atomically, in Mathew Weir’s leaves. It’s the light that controls not just what we see but how and why we see it and it’s this light – mere bumps from the sun sent from the past that herald our future - that is painting’s very last bump: the beginning, middle and end of this beautiful, bountiful, bumpy journey.

Matt Carey-Williams is grateful to the Private Collection who kindly loaned Jessie Makinson’s Dear Demon (2020) to ‘Episode I: Bump’. He would also like to thank the following for their kind support towards both ‘Episode I: Bump’ and ‘Scene II: Bumps on Paper’:
Ines Fallaha, London
Sasha Gomeniuk at Hales Gallery, London
Will Hine at Grimm, London
Isaac Lyles at Lyles and King, New York
Ema O’Donovan at Xxijra Hii, London
Belen Piñeiro at François Ghebaly, Los Angeles
Donnie Roark, London
Virginia Sirena at Victoria Miro, London
Jonny Tanna at Harlesden High Street, London
Fergus Wiltshire, London