Painting the Ashes.

These two paintings are beginning to help coalesce my thinking. The garden with its trees are all around me and so provide a focus. If at all possible I want to fuse paint and subject, surface and space. A big painting is leaning against the wall and but the problem that I have with it is that using the ash as my starting point, my locus, and drawing in paint, the painting encourages too small marks ,which doesn't seem to be a problem in the drawings. Anyway, it will stand a lot of work yet and these two feel better, or at least I feel better about them. For now.

Working on the Red Ash, now in winter.

                                                             

I began looking at this back in the summer and since the autumn have made a number of drawings towards a new set of paintings. The paring down of the information as the tree sheds its foliage sets new problems in terms of space and picture surface. Looking at various texts today I found Martin Buber and this seemed appropriate:

Through all of this the tree remains my object and has its place and its time span, its kind and condition.But it can also happen,if will and grace are joined, that I am drawn into a relation and the tree ceases to be an IT. The power of exclusiveness has seized me. The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination,no aspect of a mood; it confronts me bodily and has to deal with me as I must deal with it, only differently.

SP @ 69

                                                            oil on canvas . 86x 44cm.

Although I often make a s.p. I do like to make one on or around a birthday and so this is this years. Each time it is different, elusive as always. I like to approach it as if for the first time and bring it through from chaos to some kind of resolution but of course as I am a plodder there are moments of utter chaos, panic and despair as the edifice crumbles and I try to save something from it. Working from the figure is not something that I am familiar with which makes it all the more interesting to do.

New work for the week past.Nothing to say but could try harder.