Week 4 Reading - In the Making: Inventing Biography - Fictionalized Fact and Factualized Fiction - Kim Jones (pp. 208-213)

So this chapter wasn't quite about what I thought it would be about based on the title (which of course is the basis for my choice of each reading, related to my own mood), but I think I ultimately reflected on the same things anyway as I would have if it had been what I expected.
At first I found it odd that Jones hadn't come up with a narrative for who Mudman is or how or where he was created, because whether it is conscious or not, I think I find it necessary to have or know or invent a narrative for an image I create.  The painting I'm working on now is of a character and an environment that I feel a need to identify and maybe relay information about other than visually through the painting (I suppose this might come into play later while choosing a title).  For example, someone asked me if the woman in my painting had a name.  I don't yet, but it's because I can't settle on one yet because I think her name is important (and maybe because she's not done, not fully existent yet).  She must also have an origin and a motive and be in a place that I recognise or at least understand.
Mudman, although he has a name, has no further origin than Jones himself and the city he is performing in.  Although Jones' biographical history and his other works, the war drawings, might inform some kind of narrative or message embedded in Mudman's appearance, or his similarity to certain recognisable forms or images, Jones rejects the notion of an intentional representation of this history other than his statement, "I tell them I like to think about being a tree," (210).  For instance, he insists on no relationship being drawn between Mudman and the idea of being a shaman or a 'primitive' being, and does not push the association of Mudman with a soldier or a tree, although the latter comparisons may be more on point with who Mudman is.  For Jones, Mudman seems to be about the materials, the environment, and the audience, and aside from his battle scene with the replica of the David, his 'performances' are rarely at all staged or even really premeditated.
In this sense, Jones is also very interested in relaying truth.  "Through his war drawings and his Mudman performance he simply represents the truth that he has observed," (p. 213).  Comparatively, I think I have little interest in truth, at least in the sense of the truth as commentary about the way things are.  I am interested, almost obsessively, in representing objects and materials from the real world in a way that is observably realistic and believable.  I feel pain in omitting detail, most of the time.  But I think that impulse is related to my desire to prove, mainly to myself, that I can show skill through paint, and to my love of sensory input and rich, detailed description, which shows not only visually, but through my writing, as well.  But my images themselves are idyllic, more of an expression of how I wish the world looked, or how I wish I existed and were perceived as a person.  The scenes I choose to paint are utopias.  When I paint images from life or from photographs, the reference has to appear clean or natural or simple or uncomplicated by competing images or entirely harmonious, or else I omit any information that does not fit these parameters. When I invent a scene, this is easier to do.  I don't like messes.  I don't like cropped things, unnecessary props, tangled vegetation, smudges, or anything of the sort, usually.  I abhor visual cues that indicate specificity in time or era, with few exceptions.  My figures are well but simply dressed in clothes with no special cuts or features (like zippers, I'm not likely to show off a zipper), that are usually either solid colours or generic-looking patterns.  This type of image does not appear often in the real modern world, but I think that's precisely why I want to paint them.  Paintings to me should be romantic, not truthful.
How my tartans fit in to this idealist aesthetic, I'm still guessing, but I think it relates to what I said about generic patterns.  Tartans are highly individualised by nature, but even someone who is familiar and can identify, by name, several clan tartans, doesn't know them all.  It's not like a print textile of repeating ducks, which you can look at and say, "those are ducks."  Tartan, too, when it is unidentified, becomes a generic pattern that often will not look out of place in one of these idyllic compositions, as long as the other elements fit the parameters.