Thinking about landscape painting

 If, as has been said, landscape painting is a funny business and really only of concern to the dabbling amateur then, I have to declare my amateur status and make myself a lapel badge. If being an amateur is someone who care little for status or praise and paints because one must then the club must have a huge membership. Okay, I will admit that it makes a change to see paintings in a gallery setting and get an opportunity to give them space to breath but at the same time see if in fact they work as paintings at all.

They eventually come back and one realises that one has moved on. These are not the same paintings. The thinking has changed without really being aware that it has. Everything looks and feels different.This should feel like good news and it does because it means that there are possibilities that I have not even recognised yet and I might yet find myself in a painting that will bring thinking and understanding together, might yet unfetter the constraints that still exist. isn't that the point of it all?

Going forward anyway.

240x176cms

oil on canvas 100x100 cms

 I have been making a lot of drawings recently, although only showing one here. A visitor was enquiring as to whether I draw for a specific painting, or, whether the latter might be derived via osmosis from the former. It was an interesting question. I almost never prepare for a painting with a drawing but drawing takes placeable the time and must be a preparation of sorts. There are lots of drawings, ( there will be a large bonfire one day) but they are never made as a direct starting point for a painting. There is no drawing from which the above painting is derived. However, it must be that, with all of the drawings that proceed and follow and are made at the some time as the painting there has to be a cross fertilisation of ideas.

I cannot help but wonder as to whether my paintings, which are so much about the perception of landscape, are also about the perception of loss, for what I once had or thought that I had and would have again. I am going again and again into my workspace and starting over: going forward anyway.

I was born and raised in England which must have something to do with it. There was no really wild nature in the south of the country but one made one's own and by the time that I found myself engaged in the drawing and painting of it it was clear that I was engaged in making my own world, a place where imagination and history and future and desire co-existed in a fragile bubble. I used to visit a row of Lombardy poplars in a field, with a barn and then, at almost the same time that I read Gerard Manley Hopkins poem, Binsey Poplars, they were felled and I never went there again.

Now I plant my own trees and make my own landscape, which for a time will be a reference to mine for that which I still need to do .

Backwards and forwards.

It does seem that part of the process is to step back, often inadvertently, looking again at what has gone before. So it is that whilst making these paintings there has been a revision and the drawings have become more representational and yet this was not intentional and rather surprising because I was focussed entirely on the marks that drawing produced. Indeed, like the process of

painting at the moment, I was working up close: at the surface of the painting I could not and did not want to see the edges of the support and in the drawings I tried to ignore the edges even though I was aware of them. I now have a wish to slow the drawings down. This has been put into practice in the making of the paintings because I have finally forced myself to keep overpainting, keep painting up close, risking losing coherence, trusting to luck and turning the painting to the wall when I leave it so that I don't see it entire yet. 
 

Postcards from the edge of heat.

 These are paintings in progress, oil on canvas,100 x 100 cms. The edge of the heat is wavering, pretty much as I am with these and yet to confirm where they might rest and when they might be turned to the wall, which is always another resting period, during which they may be reassessed. I make paintings: I'll own that that is what I do. I won't say that I am a painter because I am unsure as to whether I am,or am not. There is a difference. Anyone can paint and many do and never consider the gulf between bumping along at the edge of competence and crossing over into understanding what painting is.

The boundary can be a rough edge, bruising, leaving scars. Failure is ever present. It is sheer bloody mindedness to persist, to keep trying to find just a little bit more, to ask oneself to justify the time spent,

the reasons for making another painting and another and another.

I would like to make sense of it all.

I would like to make sense of me.

A summer storm.

A summer storm. oil on canvas, 120x120cms

I have planted lots of trees over the years: my current garden of just over an acre has more than a hundred. Some are spaced out to fill out, some are closer to reach and create intimate, shady areas. They are not always immune to damage as sometimes the summer storms can be brief but very strong, In more exposed parts of the landscape we have seen a whole row of mature trees blown down. When I step outside of my workplace I am enfolded into a wood.

Turner was a keen fisherman and spent hours observing the weft and weave of water which memory he called upon so often to make his paintings. They were grand recreations, memory on the move, memory and observation melded into imagination. 

Writing, reading, thinking, painting and drawing can lead us into unknown places, making connections and reconnections. I did not see this storm: I was away when it happened but returned to clear away broken branches torn down with heavy, sodden foliage. The storm broke some and left others untouched. I wanted to make something that spoke to what had occurred but still had to be about paint. There are closed areas and open ones and the yellow line to the right is a reminder that the surface is just there. It is a painting after all.

Here and now

oil on canvas. 100x100cms

I admire John Constable's paintings. I have a suspicion that I have always done so. Overlooking our house from an elevated position one recent evening, I saw Golding Constable's garden, its light, its shadows; time compressed in an instant on this evening in France, in the Aveyron, on this evening in Suffolk in England. His painting an intimation of mortality, a here and now.

Lucien Freud once thought The Hay Wain silly but he changed his mind. A few years ago I went to see the Constable show at the V&A. I felt that I knew his paintings: I was wrong. I do remember thinking that they should be outside in the light and the air, in the heat and the rain so that those connections could be made and felt. Weather and noise. One of the things that interests me is that we do not think of noise in these landscapes and yet they would have been noisy places with people calling to one another, shouting; whistling; singing. I am aware of it though much reduced in my own surroundings: voices in the distances chain saw; a tractor; the cry of buzzards; kestrels; a Golden Oriole.

Time passing, one day to the next, one century to another. Here and now, in this moment and in that.

Something shared.

I have been reading from essays by Rackstraw Downes and thought to share this part: he talks about Joe Fiore, who, before going out to paint, would immerse himself in reading. Stendhal, whilst writing his The Charterhouse of Palma, would read from the Civil Code. I was pleased to come across this as a shared activity, settling the mind before committing oneself whatever might be the task to be engaged with.

New landscape.

180x160cms oil on canvas.

There are many paintings of my garden made in the last sixteen years and they are all different as it seems that as it changes, so do I and so does my approach to it. There are times when I take a much more objective approach, a more analytical direction of what I am seeing and then, something broader like this.

Reciprocity and the age of an oak.

78x60cms

                                                                       78x60cms

                                                                     78x60cms

What might be the painting of space might also be the painting of relation , the reciprocity of seeing and being. This is a well worn theme of mine wanting to meld the two. This is of course impossible, given the immutable plasticity of paint and the complexity of the space which we inhabit. So perhaps it is also to do with memory, if these two are not incompatible. I am not painting what I see and yet I am and I am painting what I feel too. Yesterday set myself to draw a large oak tree in the garden ( a quick measure around the trunk at my chest height times Pi, which give the diameter, and multiplying by the growth coefficient for oak x5 comes out at 216 years give or take) by spending time looking at it and then not looking at it whilst I drew - a common enough exercise - so as to try to feel it , to draw the feel of it. Of course there is such a huge gap between the two things and I have no idea what happens in that space between looking and drawing, but it is very interesting never the less.

The bush and garden.

100x80cms

150x120cms

150x120cms

162x130cms

The number of times that I have thought that I could move on from the
 bush and the garden have brought me no further: there is it seems, so much more to gain. Artists return again and again to their subject. The fact of doing so gives me a lifeline. I have spent sixteen years now in this small landscape, watching and feeling the changes in it and in me. It will of course outlast me but whilst I am in it, it is in me and that engagement continues to hold me close.

In the thick of it.

                                                       large garden. oil on canvas.72x56 ins

I read a piece today about being in the painting which seemed about right. Also it feels right that being in the painting is conjoined with being in the thing painted and that the painting is in me. I noted before that I have taken to work up close to the support so that I try to immerse myself in the process of painting, of the texture and touch and only see the whole later, when of course it could be all wrong.

January painting

I began these paintings before the New Year but they have only come together since January.  There have been several drawings made during their construction and it really has been an attempt, in the drawings, to concentrate on the marks and to allow the image to arrive on its own. However, the paintings are to do with other kinds of mark, tracks on a field, shadow and light.

Five hedges

One of the many interesting things about working from a narrow aspect, in this case, a door/window of narrow proportions, is that, due to the closeness of my self to the surface and the closeness of the outside to the inside, is that often, I am not sure what I am looking at and because of that, the marks on the surface start to have a life of their own, related to but not of the hedge, in this case. I like that. I like that one can just let go of it. I observe the hedge, sometimes that is all I do in a day and then start to make something that is itself primarily.