Eleven garden paintings: towards an understanding. In which the painter looks but may not understand what to make of it.

oil on wood panel. 50x50cm.

oil on canvas. 50x50cm

oil on paper. 25x25cm.

oil on canvas. 30x30cm.

                                                                    oil on paper 25x25cm.

                                                                oil on paper 25x25cm.

                                                                      oil on paper.25x25cm.

                                                                oil on wood panel 50x50cm.

                                                                  oil on canvas, 20x20cm.

                                                                   oil on paper. 25x25cm.

                                                                   oil on paper.25x25cm.

oil on paper 25x25cm.

This is a tricky period.  There are all sorts of things churning around in my head and the outcome may

not have anything to do with these small paintings but may be kickstarted by them. Do I want to paint landscape? No I do not. Do I want to be affected by landscape? Hard to avoid it.  Do I want to acknowledge that it has been the one thing ocurring in all my painting so far? Yes, no, yes . So what now? 

Well the painting is the thing and I am not a figure painter and I am not someone who wants to paint objects and their interaction with space and I am not an abstract painter at all. I am however interested in a good story and it seems to me that there is a good story in the land and our occupation of it and its occupation of us. A walk then comes to mind; bok (anglo saxon boec), beech (writing on), track, way, mapping, story telling. A short hop to picture making and recording or expressing sensation. It is now that we must have truck with the image and the making of the image. To ask what it is and what it does and how it does it. I choose paint but it is paint which must be made to serve the telling of the story which is both of itself (the act of painting) and of the thinking involved. There is an element of me being in the land and the land being in me. I have an exterior, interior  and anterior landscape and the act of painting is an attempt to pull them together so that I may understand. Making a mark on the terrain that is my painting/drawing shifts dynamics in my head . It isn't just my hand at work. Further more there is the distinction to be made between making paintings and making pictures. One of them has formalist concerns of shape, line, value, colour ,texture, pace etc and the other I think might be about something more inchoate, as a conversation begun but not completed. I am reminded of something attributed to David Park.... that accepting and immersing myself in subject matter I paint with more intensity and that the "hows" of painting are more inevitably determined by the "whats`'.