Widescreen Version

Finally, into a new year, an update of recent painting practice, this example being the latest in the series of still life studies of a selection of the sawn cylinders of silver birch, (re)presented as a panorama suggesting a woodland space rather than the domestic arrangement it in fact is.

The physical support is a length of shelf from a deconstructed unit (which thus has a relationship to the similar horizontal plane on which the objects are composed and actively observed), over which canvas has been stretched.

As is habitual, the application of the paint is intended to make of the painting an object and foreground itself as handmade material fact as it represents other objects in space.

‘Woodscape With Objects’

oil on canvas on board/15.5 x 78cm/January 2019

[angled view]

[detail left]

[detail centre]

[detail right]

 

Summer (so far) Update

When not sat a desktop PC at work (which commitment coincides with the term-time of the typical UK academic year), I tend not to have any great desire to log in and use a computer, thus blogging about matters cultural and one’s creative practice (as distinct from Instagramming on a mobile phone) tends to take a back seat, as has been the case since late June.

However, the painting produced thus far over the ‘vacation’ has reached a point where it sort-of demands to be blogged in order to maintain that particular aspect of the process of creative practice and to maintain a currency of presence in cyberspace.

To this end, I now (re)present the five examples of a body of paintings that have been developed over the course of the last couple of months, which take advantage of the seasonal availability of greater and brighter amounts of natural daylight in which to produce ‘white paintings’ (other project ideas and further developments of bodies of work in progress have accordingly been placed on the back burner until the autumn).

The objects represented are a selection of objects, vessels, moulded in air-drying clay from existing vessels, and display certain wonky characteristics such as finger and thumb marks and imperfect forms resulting from this process of hand-making which seem to coincide with the Japanese aesthetic of ‘wabi-sabi’, hence the titles of the works.

The vessels are composed in subtly changing configurations of relationships in the manner of most artists who work within the genre of still life and are painted in a manner that aims to communicate something of the nature of the fleeting play of natural light as it describes objects in space and the surfaces upon and against which they are arranged.

‘Wabi-sabi Vessels #1’

oil on canvas/16″ x 20″/July 2018

‘Wabi-sabi Vessels #2’

oil on canvas/16″ x 20″/July 2018

‘Wabi-sabi Vessels #3’

oil on canvas/16″ x 20″/August 2018

‘Wabi-sabi Vessels #4’

oil on canvas/16″ x 20″/August 2018

‘Wabi-sabi Vessels #5’

oil on canvas/16″ x 20″/August 2018

Once more into the woods…

Posting today an image of the sum total of the weekend’s painting activity, compromised and curtailed somewhat by the murky greyness of the available ‘daylight’ coupled with feeling a tad under the weather, by no means the most promising combination of circumstances in which to make a great deal of progress, but brush did meet paint met canvas and active contemplation did take place so at least #4 of the ‘woodscapes’ is under way.

Deep(er) in the Woods

Following yesterday’s post, detailing the small revisions made to the first two ‘woodscape’ paintings, today we present the fruit of what has been the main thrust of creative activity over and since the Yuletide period in the form of a third such painting taking as its visual source a scene from deep within the predominantly pine-wooded environment beyond the rear perimeter of TOoT Towers (working in the conservatory at the back of the property is, obviously, the perfect location for all those instances of necessary empirical visual research that are an essential component of the painting process).

‘Woodscape #3’ oil on canvas/48″ x 24″/December 2016 – January 2017

‘Resolved’ (whether suitably/satisfactorily enough only time spent looking and considering will reveal), the painting continues in the manner of that pair preceding it and reveals explicitly its facture, the overt structure of horizontal and vertical brushstrokes, and the materiality of the paint and its mostly wet-into-wet application in the service of both the painting-as-object (transitional object) and the represented embodied experience of being present within the woods, treading upon the carpet of pine needles and moss and being confronted by the sheer verticality of the tree trunks and evidence of their foliage between and beyond. What one finds is that communicating this experience in paint becomes more and more complex and difficult each time one returns to the easel to represent the subject matter, more hermetic for want of a better word (and Cubism and Cézanne are never very far away, either) as, perhaps, this painting appears.

Outside of the world of the painting, but a valuable part of the process of its making, I must make mention of a couple of the elements of the accompanying musical soundtrack – Tom Waits’ ‘Mule Variations’, which sounded particular wonderful this last Sunday afternoon, and the long-overdue discovery of Can, oft-cited as an influence upon a number of artists whose work has proved to be an enduring favourite (not least early Public Image Ltd) but, especially absurdly it seems in the event, who had remained unexplored until recently, intriguing stuff and suitable grist to the painting mill.

Digesting October…

It’s been a funny old month, October, with the painting progress having slowed still further (not least due to the abandonment of the ‘double black lines’ & flattened cans project, with the next in the series having been scraped-off after a couple of weeks’ work), but not entirely unproductive, with the evidence of a work-in-progress pictured above (with apologies for the blurry-in-places photograph, courtesy of the fading light of the first afternoon following the turning-back of the clocks, which caught us somewhat unawares: it was, after all, only 10 past 4 – disastrous time of year for those of us who paint under natural light conditions).

By way of brief explanation, what is in progress, then, is one of the recently-acquired more widescreen canvases (4′ x 2′), which seemed, after consideration, to be the most appropriate format/scale to explore the potential of the subject matter of the conveniently-situated woods beyond the back garden fence of the grounds of TOoT Towers (ironically a bungalow!). Primarily planted with pine & Japanese larch (an abandoned commercial venture of some years ago), with silver birch interspersed, the woods provide a suitable combination of the vertical & horizontal, & textural & tonal, with which to begin a painterly investigation of various ‘snapshots’ of what is a large site. A few drawings were made of the environment over three summers ago now (so, again, it’s another idea & developmental intention that’s been percolating for a while) , & can be viewed on the original TOoT‘s July & August 2013 archive pages.