Drawing board in the new place.
Thinking.
Drawing board.
Tag: painting
where vision leads
“My vision of painting,” Auerbach once said, “was of an explosion.”
From here (the guardian)
Grave carved winged hour glass in a grave yard in Impington, Cambs.
I went out painting landscape in Kent once (with Stephen Palmer) probably hmm 2012? From my perspective it was a disaster – I found it impossible to focus on any one thing – the landscape was a sprawl of incomplete forms blending together in incomprehensible variations. My drawings were a mess. The wind, the temperatures, and the noise kept me in a permanent state of distraction.
It reminds me of a television programme on landscape painting I once watched. The person narrating (I forget who) discusses a painting (I forget whose) in awed tones as they had painted ‘every single leaf’ on a tree. It filled me with a sort of existential horror. Wasteful. To me it seemed wasteful. Devotion to accounting details.
To organise, to apply design to landscape was uh daunting. Practice was the obvious solution. But the sensory overload was too much… I left it alone until imaginative forms of landscape insistently kept emerging in my work.
The walks I had been making across London were bleeding into all my thinking and painting. I would walk from New Cross, where I lived to Charing Cross, where I worked – and then back again. Not that the job survived long after I began that process.
Then and again, I resumed those earlier studies, over a decade later but keeping myself to short sketches.
Pencil on paper, a3 sketchbook, 2022.
The more recent attempts to tackle landscape gave up similar results. But I can see elements I can bring out. I can break up the shapes and how I relate them to each other. Chaotic still – and my immediate responses are retained. Moving line work into painting – then musing on the other ways plantlife can be depicted.
Mixed media on paper, A3ish, 2023
Still there’re so much more things to work with. The photo of the winged hourglass is a small, rather wonderful example of landscape
Explaining iii
Continuing the deep delve into the processes and influences that run through my work and the methods of working. We enter more new ground in terms of what I’m willing to allow into the blog. The front page of this site is a selection of the marvelous photos Luana took of the studio I just dismantled. These are my own photographs of activity in the studio. Fairly regularly I post photos of the drawing board on instagram illustrating how I might keep many paintings going at once.
Not shown is the mess of paintings strewn across the floor.
Starting point might be a colour, a design, a pattern, an idea of weight balance or perspective, or maybe a simple shape given repetition or extra angles.
As I develop the colours so I compare how colours are working in each painting – or I might press a couple together to spread the paints about, shake up the more settled painting.
Below the paintings are Polaroid photos – sometimes a direct source for images sometimes background atmosphere, sometimes inspiration.
The red circle has been growing and shrinking, & there’s line drawing at the bottom that has been mutating through many forms. Broad blocks of varying degrees of opacity are brushed over areas then partially removed… sometimes totally removed. Those colours are brought into other paintings – usually adding to texture or breaking up stolid forms.
There are elements of chaos to my methods, in fact there are elements of chaos to my thinking.
Chimera ii
See here for an attempt to wrestle with Blake’s reasons for inserting a swan / person hybrid in his great poem Jerusalem.
I wonder if there needs to be a precise reason. & maybe Blake held swans in a particular view – with in a particular poetic scheme – they had their own significance for him. Large aggressive birds – beautiful, soulful & affectionate family creatures…. I don’t know when they got their associations with royalty? Hm. Maybe they are boot lickers…
Since Blake tended to keep multiple meanings running concurrent – or perhaps had multiple purposes for his symbols, tropes, devices… each can support multiple understandings.
Humanity ‘s nature expressed through hybridised animal / human is an old image – present in ancient cave art – specific meaning applied to them ——-
is it fire or are they shoots
Meandering across waters of various degrees of thickness. Not all of Cambridgeshire was fen – but so much of it now seems to need swimming or wading or walking around. Beside the Cam which slowly flows, a shocking mix of sewage and all that’ll grow in that – the temperature rises and the faecal soup grows bacteria and microbes, plus there’s the phosphates and nitrates…. This is interesting — here
People mind their immediate environs only so much. Y’know. Some and some. There are plenty of people and plenty don’t look beyond their immediate convenience – just travel – picked up and put down at the doors they inhabit. The petri dishes under their microscopes, their screens, their telescopes offer them their landscapes.
across the universe
It’s spring – dunno for how long – a very bright spring. Feels like the light opens everybody up. Winter goes on and I think it’s easy to to look more inwards – looking around is harder when we’re all forced indoors by the constant rain that seemed to be with us for 12 months or so.
Microscopes and telescopes, and the architecture to hold them, Cambs. has a countryside where – near or far – everything is under scrutiny…..
[security cameras too — we’re all being scrutinised — on social media you know ++]
….People breaking the world down to numbers, absorbed in fossils, pulling apart life to find further life. all of these being grand visions of landscape whether writ tiny or writ beyond our capacities to see.
Walks taking us through strange villages of laboratories. Gets my imagination on overload.
A walk I did a few weeks back has started haunting me a little. It’s partly because of Cambridge chatter about the role of the university in the economy and culture of the area – impact on the house prices and building across the outlying towns and villages…
We walked to Coton, a little village, and to get there we walked through an old university site littered with observatories, laboratories and storage. Big hunks of fossilized trees on the porch of the earth sciences storage facilities, the inevitable grand pillars. Buildings of odd dimensions. Some specifically designed to house telescopes, big dome like roves and little dome like structures. Some structures that had arcane uses once but now are storage sheds. Next to it a peculiar looking run down ex industrial unit looking like it was built out of asbestos and now, closed to all business; shuttered up with warning signs and cameras.
Further on we wandered through two large science parks. Huge buildings, most of them shiny and ugly – fully embracing their looming Ballardian nature. Little rivers running under them, some small efforts to combat the exponentially increasing flooding of the area. So much of cambs looks like it is becoming fen. Aptly – and increasingly so – silicon fen is the monicker been applied to the continuing growth of industries computer related in the region.
My thoughts have gravitated to speculation on the activities in these science parks. It’s not just computer sciences being explored but also genetics and pharmaceuticals and pretty much anything you can get financing for….
It’s worth noting at this point that we continued our wanderings we would have reached the radio telescopes just past Cottenham.
So the eery Cambridgeshire countryside – flat and full of ghosts – holds a Myriad of interrogated landscapes. Microcosms and macrocosms – bodies of every sort becoming landscapes. Under huge skies, planted in sodden earth. – glinting structures of ridiculous proportions and often absurd grandiose design.
Needs work
This looks better in the real. – they all do – this is on the edge of completion.
Air That Tickles the Throat
I have something lacking when it comes to talking about art – and it goes beyond impatience. In the pub I’m very happy to throw ideas around – similarly at pvs & exhibitions. Describing my own work, putting it into writing, I find gruelling, reductive…?
I’ve had people tell me it’s conceptual and I’ve had people tell me it’s figurative and I’ve had many conversations on what it means to be abstract. I’m not sure I find these terms greatly definitive – sometimes useful – but in conversation rather than absolutely.
The movements I admire are all in the dust – reviving the terms seems foolish, maybe furthering reductive processes on art language and joining the general cacophony of nebulous art speak.
What a thing is can change – things can be repurposed. To imbue a thing with meaning… requires what…?
I had an idea for an installation – take a gallery space in one of these big old art museums, calculate (hah – somehow) how much dust n cobwebs would’ve been cleaned out of it – in say the couple of hundred years of its lifespan – & return it. Ideally filling it up wall to wall top to bottom.
Growth out
o 