Skies

The skies here are are source of wonder, sometimes saturated with colour , sometimes full of movement. here is one that I made earlier.

Is it me or....

I've been rereading back issues of Modern Painters : for comparison I flipped through the recent issues. There's the difference then.

Some new paintings

I've been looking through my website and determining to change the images - it's time- but this blog seems a more user friendly way for me so for now I'll post a few images here. Meabh went looking for paintings to photograph from my studio and bemoaned the fact that she couldn't find them. I suspect its too late: I hold on to paintings only so long as they are useful to look at. At some point they serve other needs. These three are 80x80cms,on canvas.

grey autumn morning

Everything changes and this painting too underwent change as I needed to simplify and pare down the visual information until a grey morning and the right moment allowed me to do this.

last stand

There is a hill beyond my window, a shallow valley too and the light shifts subtly and dramatically. One gets advance notice of the weather from beyond this hill. However this is a painting, so it can be read as having been influenced by the landscape but also by the passage of time. Time looking and time making, because small doesn't mean fast here.

poplar - summer

Poplar - summer was made over several weeks and is several paintings. This large poplar was never still and has great bulk when buffeted by the wind. I kept returning to this painting and reworking it until the weather changed and it became a different thing altogether.

falling light

This was made in the evening in summer when the light was dropping fast and I had been working on four foot square paintings all day. I am often not particularly looking at my external surroundings but I am at the same time aware of them, and sometimes there is an insistent but faint tug that seems to say now, now, do it now.

summer storm approaching

It can be very hot here and the light intense and there can be violent storms. Light and shadows and the threat of rain is what is behind the making of this.

spring

Most days for the last five years I have begun the day with a small painting whatever else I may have been doing. The painting might be on canvas as here, or on paper. I have deliberately returned to the same surface and the same painting, building up a surface which may well have begun with an image akin to my view but which progressively acretes marks and patches of colour which are about the landscape but which are also about making a painting.

hill - showers

When the wind from the northwest brings rain the contours of the hill rapidly diffuse whilst at the same time there can be slashes of bright colour visible. There was a field freshly mown of hay which jumped out in the sunlight before disappearing.

Showers

Of all these small paintings this might be my favourite: it works, it was made fast after watching the light weaving and bobbing across the fields and almost waiting too long before I started to paint. I had been making four foot by three foot drawings during the morning, working initially with my eyes shut and my mind empty (not hard , the empty mind bit) trying to feel my way into another painting. When I looked up from the floor where I had been working, this was happening.