Last painting of the year.

                                                
                                                             The Norwegian pullover.
                                                               oil on card 68x38cm


The last day. Tomorrow a new start. It is cold, grey but sun is forecast. It has been a year where I have stepped forward to take my place. Both parents are dead. I must make the best use of time now. I am looking forward to it. Turner is supposed to have said that the sun is God. I think painting runs it pretty close.

A not so small history painting

Leaving. oil on board 160x160 cms

I was cleaning house, throwing out paintings and drawings that I had not looked at for years, A bonfire was building. I found this. There was a period of reading Kierkegaard and making paintings about loss and betrayal and trying to do the right thing and another period reading Martin Buber and thinking about reciprocity and being in relation to the thing observed which continues into a lot of my current work. This painting is from a series about my family and my family"s story. I have decided to keep it, for now.

A funny thing happened on my way to a painting

                                               ink, charcoal, emulsion on paper 80x60cm

oil on canvas, 100x100cm

I am often asked whether drawing precedes painting. The answer is that drawing is a separate thing and that drawing may well take place whilst painting is in progress. This happens often to lots of people: drawing might clarify something; it might happen for an entirely (seemingly) unrelated reason; it might be just for its own sake. I draw a lot. I draw mostly from my garden. But this drawing was made without looking at a piece of my parochial world. I drew away from the windows. I drew freely, without thinking too much and I drew having already started the painting with big blocks of colour more like a loose Paul Klee than what I have now. Most of all - and here so far I have failed - I started out to make a painting about marks, a kind of field painting which could move beyond the renaissance window. So the act of drawing led me astray or led me somewhere else.

work in progress

ink, oil and emulsion on paper 180x120cm

oil on canvas. 100x80cm

oil on canvas. 100x80cm

In the making of a painting which refers to landscape, it is the marks and the overlaying of them and of colour which builds another landscape, that of the painting itself. For me this is the goal: a surface which can be read for its own sake but can be a surface/space which reads also as a collection of experiences translated into paint or drawing, both of which are cyphers to be interpreted as clues to a shared imaginative response to thinking about and experiencing surroundings.
There are many underlying layers and the final surface is the result of a journey which might continue after the painting is physically halted. by the observer interacting with it and being prompted to renew their relation to the visual and mental world.

Mixed bag - three paintings of the land and two maps of my face.

 It is a while since I let work on my visage surface. I use myself a lot because I am always available. The landscape is similarly at hand.  I have this idea that I could marry the approaches but it seems beyond me at the moment and indeed whilst working on the self portraits I know in the back of my mind that they are not like the drawings I make either. Nowhere near as daring. However there is a change. I keep turning my head and it seems that this does bring about or allow a fuller picture. Its early days I guess . I just need to go back and try again.

Paintings x 4 .End of summer.

I have made these paintings in recent weeks: the view from my windows changing all the time now. The influence of the season strong but the paintings themselves intuitive. We live in interesting times. The world is turning; my father has died along with summer. Painting is a good thing to do.

Letter from America.

There will be those of you who will remember Alistair Cooke and his radio broadcast. I always looked forward to his very personal take on his adopted country. I wonder what it would be like if he were writing that letter today. An american friend of mine wrote asking what I had been up to and of course I have been up to a lot and at the same time not very much in the grand scheme of things.

I have a very small view of the world from my shed but that is not to say that the world passes me by: reading keeps me informed , politics, history, writers on art keep me informed, Jed Pearl intrigues me and keeps me thinking.

At this time of year I am very conscious of the changes in the landscape. My own small woodland is full of flickering light and shadow and I would like my painting to be like that movement, something that flickers in the memory perhaps. Anyway this is what, amongst other things I can answer my friends question with.

Spirit of place.

These two paintings are about topography in that they evoke my surroundings, but they also speak to me of a sense of myself too and my place in relation to the space that I inhabit. I could take some one and show them the place that gave rise to these but they would not be me and they would see the place differently. Perhaps though, they would recognize another country.

Becoming someone.

  

                                                    untitled. oil on canvas, 100x100cm

Burning the bank. oil on canvas. 100x100cm

In the beginning there was the painting without a particular direction, which then recalled the burning of the bank and hedgerow by a local farmer. Then came the conflict between the connection and its depiction and the painting. I had to keep pulling the painting back to itself but there were fields, hedges,  spaces, events all crowding in and requiring some sort of resolution. So what I have, after many revisions, is an uneasy alliance. Of course ,once given a title - Burning the bank - the painting will be read in that context and subordinated to the title whilst what I want is for the painting to be foremost.

I think of my painting as an unfolding story of who I am becoming and if history and painting can be likened at all to each other in that they can be said to be stories told by the victor then I have surprised myself by becoming something that I did not imagine, both victor and vanquished.

One of the reasons for returning to the self portrait is that the subject is always changing and so is the way that the paint is used. The material and its application are a source of fascination the exploration of which keeps me coming back. Coupled with the hourly, daily changes in my appearance , the constant shifting of my reflected image, my shifts in temperament and differing qualities of light, the whole enterprise is compelling. Also, as Stella Duffy says, it is not just the subject that gives significance to the portrait but what the artist includes and chooses to exclude.

La Tour Montsales. July.

Soon, June 30th - July 26th, La Tour, Montsales, Aveyron will host Artistes de Montsales et du Causse.

I hope to include one of the paintings here but have not decided which.

Being there.

Andrew Wyeth is credited with saying: Finally, when you get far enough along in a thing, you feel as though you're living there - not working at a painting - but actually working in that valley. You're there.

Today, I think I know what he meant.

Painting and thinking.

                                                              Catherine Pamplin. oil on paper.

                                                                      oil on canvas

I had recently, the unusual experience of watching an artist friend work. The painting progressed carefully over the course of an afternoon and provided me with an opportunity to reflect upon another persons process, decisions, revisions, adjustments. One is of course aware that this is always going on but to step outside it and be a quiet observer taught me a lot. I became aware, whilst making the above painting of the movements of my friends work even though it was turned away from me as it dried.

Essentially as an act of creation, it has to engage by making something out of nothing. There is an image in mind sometimes and the painting works towards the realization of the image but at other times the act of painting is the image. The image can be the result of a dialogue that the artist has with themselves but in addition creates an opportunity for a dialogue with the observer and the observer is brought into relation with it. In the case of my friends painting she was setting out, or working out a story, something she was thinking about. It can be read by an observer although the true meaning may remain personal. In my painting, the reading may be more obvious but both paintings develop out of inner dialogue.

Applied to painting, critical thinking too often ends up calling into question the very medium—a deconstructionist impulse that particularly sabotages beginning students. Playing baseball or tennis requires accepting the game as a whole, and so does painting. But unlike baseball or tennis, painting is an open-ended pursuit without any numerical victory or defeat. It’s fraught with subjectivity and uncertainty. It is, as an artist I know has said, one semi-mistaken brushstroke after another applied until a kind of truce against the possibility of a perfect painting is reached. ( Laurie Fendrich) Or as de Kooning thought, starting over at every stage.

 There is a quote from Robert Motherwell which sits well with both of the above paintings. 'Painting is a medium in which the mind can actualize itself. It is a medium of thought. Thus painting, like music, tends to become its own content.

Two paintings, early Spring.

 

                                                      oil on canvas. 100x100cms

                                                         oil on canvas. 30x30cms

Skies are unusually grey and light silken but not bright. I have been very fortunate to have been able to spend some time drawing with a model; just the head, but not mine. It is a different experience and a different challenge. Now I need to focus on drawing again from the garden but before I commit to that I have made these two paintings.

Observation.

                                        Garden at February's end. oil on canvas 100x100cm

Head of the pianist. charcoal. 75x68cm

Observation involves scanning: side to side ; up; down; forwards and backwards; memory and selection.

Observing a portion of the garden, I move things around and bring in elements of things seen at different times of the day, sections from photographs taken in the garden or whilst out walking.

It should add up to an experience of movement; weather; light; shade; senses and time passing.

Nothing is still. The earth is spinning and I with it.

February fill dyke.

When I was growing up and first taking an interest in painting one of the images that impressed me was a painting by Benjamin Williams Leader. It only became popular after the Jubilee Exhibition in Manchester and apparently was a painting of a November day.

My painting is definitely February and definitely a wet one.

How long does it take ?

garden 21:01:18

brief sunlight 09:01:18

I was being asked this morning (a not entirely serious question I suspect ), how long I worked on a painting. I can't tell: days, weeks, months, years sometimes. Of course some of that is thinking time and some of that thinking time is whilst I am engaged with something else. It must include walking; reading;

revisiting a painting; looking at other artists work. I really like to look at Sienese painting which does not seem to have anything to do with what I do but I admire them and always go to see them in the National Gallery in London.

These paintings on paper have been rather rapid for me, a few days work at most, a lot of scraping off as usual but never the less completed within a week. It hardly matters how long it takes or rather it takes as long as it takes.

I have a friend who enjoys her painting. I have seen her working for twenty years or so and watched her confidence build. She sent me an e-mail with her new ones and here they are:

Miri Felix, Thank you.

Three paintings, Early January, William Hazlitt.

10:01:18

05:01:18

01:01:18

There is something about following a path. It becomes a thread, a link, something exploratory, full of history, full of connections.

William Hazlitt wrote; I can saunter for hours, bending my eye forward, stopping and turning to look back, thinking to strike off into some less trodden path, yet hesitating to quit the one I am on, afraid to snap the brittle threads of memory.

In working on these paintings, I have tried hard to snap that thread but it is proving tough to do. The connections with my view are still there even though every time it starts to look like landscape I paint it out and start again. Perhaps, if in an imaginary exhibition, all that I have done could be seen, the thread would still be there. 

It was said of him that he had but one painting in him and he painted it again and again.