A Conclusion…

The luxury of four painting sessions over an extended weekend allowed the Samuel Beckett photorealist ‘portrait’, after a print of Jane Bown‘s original photograph, to arrive at some form of resolution, presented here below upon the easel in a state of repose and in various details.

Although I’d previously spent a couple of years, individually, on drawing-from-photographic-source projects (please refer to the 2008 and 2014 (actually March ’14 – February ’15) archives over at the Blogspot version of TOoT), developing technique between, I’d not worked in oil on canvas and on such a scale in such a manner (although the recentish series of ‘woodscapes’ referred to compositional photos in support of other empirical sources) – obviously there are many different stylistic precedents that one is aware of (even, to take such as Gerhard Richter or Chuck Close for example, within the work of a particular artist) and it became very much a matter of working towards interpreting the source image in a way that had integrity as ‘painterly material’ (and technique) for want of a better phrase, achieving that balance between painted mark as painted mark and a certain fidelity to the source as image, the former as ‘actively contemplated’ response to the latter, of course.

‘Samuel Beckett After Jane Bown Photograph’

oil on canvas/40″ x 30″/October 2017

[detail]

[detail]

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Finally, here’s the painting in position as it was ‘processed’, alongside the source image.

An Update

The Samuel Beckett portrait (see previous entry) in its current state after a long session’s painting on Saturday afternoon and another hour on Tuesday morning: a long way still to go before any form of resolution is reached, and the scope/need for many a revision along that way.

Slow Painting A-Comin’…

‘Samuel Beckett’ oil on canvas/40″ x 30″ (in progress)

Currently, I’m attempting something in paint that I’ve not done previously, in transposing a photograph – and an iconic one, at that – in oils on a large scale, in response to what we shall term a domestic commission. The challenge, to begin, has proved itself to be exactly how one might go about such an endeavour, with a few false starts thrown in, before things have started to make some sort of visual sense and progress is being made, albeit in stately fashion.

The starting point, the subject, is of course a print (A3 and squared-up to be drawn on to the canvas) of Jane Bown’s famous and rather wonderful portrait of Samuel Beckett, taken in 1976 when Beckett would have been seventy years of age, delightfully craggily expressive of features. The good thing about such an enlarging is that it allows a freedom with the application of the paint, to make of a mechanical photographic print something hand-made and painterly – whether the result in any way does justice to the original and subject will be another matter.

In an act of what might be termed ‘method painting’, I’m currently reading Beckett’s novel ‘Molloy’ and will soon be taking up ‘Malone Dies’ in order to in some way ‘inhabit’ the author/subject and the world he creates – that this experience is a pleasurable one only enhances to the experience, the creative process.

Passions Overflowing

Featuring today a recent, glorious & irresistible find (& subsequent purchase, thanks to the wonderful A, who came to the rescue & took the decision for me when I couldn’t quite bring myself to ‘invest’ the £20 asking price – which, of course, has proved to be an absolute bargain), from amongst the treasure trove of the second hand bookshelves at Dagfields, that, coincidentally, links nicely to the most recent entry on the Groundhog’s excellent, must-read football ground-visiting blog, a result of the author’s travels having taken him to Berlin.

The object of desire in question is the German-language publication ‘Fussballtempel’ & is a veritable cornucopia of delights, lavishly illustrated as it is with panoramic photographs of a selection of mostly German football stadia, supplemented with a few Austrian & Swiss examples.

Primarily concerned with the homes of top-level &/or historically noteworthy clubs, a number of the images are naturally of recent developments in stadium design & construction, which to my tastes don’t hold a great deal of aesthetic interest, seeming pretty much similar in their shiny new blandness, lacking that particular visual ‘atmosphere’ that defines the most attractive of the genre, most of which, therefore, are of a certain vintage (we are, of course, incorrigibly nostalgically-prone here at TOoT).

Fortunately, ‘Fussballtempel’ features many such gems, either in the form of the inclusion also of some of the predecessors of the new stadia (unfavourable comparisons between new & old, in favour of the latter, are inevitable, as the reader might imagine) or otherwise the still-current but longer-established grounds of other clubs, not least from the east which, back in the day of the separate entities of East & West Germany, was/were always much our favourite/s, in the shape of the likes of the Dynamos Berlin & Dresden, Lokomotive Leipzig, Carl Zeiss Jena, Hansa Rostock, Sachsenring Zwickau & 1FC Magdeburg to name a selection (all of whom we have collected lapel badges of the crests of, as featured on the original TOoT over 2013-14, should anyone wish to repair there to admire at their leisure).

One particularly notable feature of a number these older German grounds is the striking and individual form of the floodlight pylons, stunning pieces of architectural design & obviously a real signifier within the context of the towns/cities in which the stadia reside. Delight also in the examples of grandstand roof design and the environmental details beyond the immediate confines of the grounds, the examples of civic architecture, the wooded hillsides, the sense of space & of them existing within a space, the landscape, none of which, alas, are visible from inside the new stadia, enclosed as they all are. Enjoyable also is the fact that each of the grounds is pictured whilst a match is actually in progress, bringing them to proper life &, related to this, other details such as those of the crowds of spectators, the very sparseness of some within stadia of obviously significant capacity.

All in all, it’s a fabulous book, to be pored over at leisure & treasured as a part of the ever-burgeoning library.

Here’s a selection of favourite images…

N.B. The tile-topped coffee table, an item of furniture long desired for the household, upon which the book has been photographed was another of our Dagfields finds & essential purchases that day.

A Walk in the Woods…

Yesterday’s constitutional around ‘our’ local woods brought a most intriguing encounter of the fictional kind, as the photo sequence below is intended to illustrate.

Taking a route up a wooden ‘staircase’ to a viewpoint, I noticed from a few steps below what appeared to be a page of paper and, upon reaching the site, stopped and stooped to inspect further, to confirm that indeed it was, more specifically printed matter, a leaf that had become unbound from a book . Continuing the ascent, rounding a corner in the stairway and then gaining the top steps, turning again to view the summit of grass and moss and trees, and in the midst of the tangle of branches and twigs of a bare bush, the sight of what was obviously a book, very likely the substance of the volume from which the just-encountered pages had become unbound, one assumed. Approaching up the rise of the hill, to the viewing area and the immediate location of the bush, closer inspection was possible. As can be observed from the photographic evidence, the book was of standard paperback format, its spine cracked and, lodged within the branches of the bush, the text open at page 305, the beginning of Chapter Fifteen, ‘The Lion’s Den’. Flurries of wind at this elevated point regularly blew this leaf over to reveal the following two pages of print, facilitating a little further glimpse into this lion’s den, before fluttering back down to rest, momentarily.

Curiosity of course dictated the disturbance of the book from its perch in order to discover more, precisely what its title and author were at least, thus revealed to be ‘Fallen’ by the hitherto unknown-to-me Lauren Ka..(te, as it proved to be in totality), the surname truncated by the physical fact of the bottom right corner of the cover having been torn off in addition to its missing pages. Such a title might fancifully complicate the mystery of who might have left the book in such a place and why – was it intimating that the object had indeed fallen, from the sky, from what- or wherever, to land in the midst of the bush, perhaps..?

Whatever the circumstances, they could be mulled over during the continuation of the walk. The book replaced within the bush, I set off to descend the wooden steps only soon to be distracted again, by the sight of another unbound page, near the top of the stairway, more of the story unfolding…