Peter Cleverley?2020

The title for my show. REMEMBER to FORGET. are words I ripped off from Bob Dylan?s song. HAS ANYONE SEEN MY LOVE. from EMPIRE BURLESQUE 1983. Remember & Forget are words opposite in meaning, then Dylan simply puts the word. TO in the middle and they have a variety of meanings. I think he was referring to forgiveness? remember to forgive. otherwise one?s baggage can get too heavy. I?ve written it on a couple of paintings and it always fits the imagery somehow. I like it’s ambiguity.

I saw the band. CREAM. in London 1975ish. They were superb. Ginger Baker’s drumming performance unforgettable. I remember his kit was very simple, the sound he got from it seemed impossible. Ginger Baker died October 2019. I remembered him in my painting GINGER BAKER in the MANIOTOTO. a great musician implanted into a wonderful landscape. I’m not reinformed by any imagery like photography, I just compose the image from memory. Manipulating the paint into something that sustains my intrigue is what is most important to me, what I try for each painting.

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The shaka is a hand gesture employed by surfers, predominantly, as a form of acknowledged ritual participation. Bobbing in the briny, primordial soup; riding deep-formed pulses of aquatic energy and embracing the general feeling of stoke, the spirit of aloha.

The shaka originated in Hawaii. Legend has it a sugar cane processing worker lost the index, middle and ring finger on his hand in a workplace accident. Employed post dismembering as a train guard, he would use his hand to wave off the local kids from jumping the train. The kids would in turn use the wave, clenched fist with thumb and pinky extended, as a sign the coast was clear to jump the train. Kids. . .bloody ingenious, really.

Images in this exhibition were sourced from anatomical illustrations, mainly the book of Vesalius, with the anatomised pictured having more to do with the land of the living than the dead. The flayed, eviscerated corpses posturing, striding, flexing in idealised landscapes. History has proven the anatomical inaccuracies in these illustrations, but these exercises in ‘wrongness’ are what have financed my long-held obsession.

These ‘figures of wrongness’ are co-opted to walk along blackened beaches; surrounded by paint; become lost in impenetrable, inky voids; subjected to external forces. . .throw shapes with their bony, sinewy appendages.