mercredi 22 septembre 2010

Trying to move on.



I've been amused by people trying to turn my paintings sideways all the time and so made this one deliberately horizontal although no doubt someone...........

I will return to the square shortly: actually it allows me the freedom to move around the canvas on the floor and gives the painting more of a chance to influence direction. I think Jackson Pollock often decided very late on which way was up.

Lastly these paintings come out of other paintings which come out of looking but in that there is a lot of failing and rebuilding. Prunella Clough said in an interview once that her failed paintings didn't fail forever, not if there was something in there that would start bothering her again.

lundi 6 septembre 2010

Arriving late by way of Constable and De Kooning




There are days when one wonders why it took so long : I have been looking at Constables work again and trying to imagine what it was like for him to be painting , even accounting for reading C.R.Leslie's Life and the letters. Then for weeks now I have had an essay on my desk on De Kooning by Bill Berkson that I have peered at often (wrong spectacles) but didn't read until today when I decided that I had finished my current painting- or painted myself out of it.

The title of the essay is, De Kooning with Attitude and he means for the reader to equate attitude with balance or more probably a balancing act. I liked too that De Kooning said that the idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can and that the subject matter in the abstract is space. Which brought me back to J.C. because that seems to be precisely what comes across, that he was thinking about space, pushing and pulling that lasts perhaps only a couple of seconds, like light, but to me takes on attitude.

vendredi 20 août 2010

Companions


In the making of these two paintings it had not occurred to me that they might be hung together until I laid them out on the studio floor and found them to be visually linked. It is not my usual practice to make a sequence and the paintings do not normally follow one another in any way, rather I try not to let that happen. However, in this case I would like them to be seen together, with the lower of the two here on the left.

dimanche 15 août 2010

Editing

This , from Sister Wendy Becket's interview with the American painter, Robert Natkin. In a reply he says that he doesn't see a difference between what is and what could be. In the finality of it the editing process is what he thinks a person (Becket) might call prayer and which in his case is considered the editing process of how he can make all aspects of his life be of some positive value. This strikes a cord in that life is not a narcissistic thing beginning and ending with oneself, but rather an engagement with humanity - approached with humility, nakedness even.

dimanche 1 août 2010

Bicci di Lorenzo





In the Ashmolean museum at Oxford there is a little painting by this Florentine artist, depicting a scene from the Life of St. Nicholas. The work can be seen to be divided more or less in two halves of light with the arrival of the saint, and dark, where the sky merges with the sea and the horizon is less clear. The sailors appear to be throwing something overboard , perhaps their belongings , perhaps something else. In three paintings that I made a few years ago I focussed on this object: there are times when something strikes me and there is a confluence of ideas that I need to respond to . I tried to do this here. In the history of my family there is an incident of incarceration, a straight jacket, a loss. I was already working with this when this beautiful painting was shown to me.

lundi 5 juillet 2010

Days,Months,Years almost.




Three paintings and the passage of time: music and silence and finally a new place to make work. One of these paintings was made in a matter of days, one has been almost a year in the making and another I started in May when the barn began to be transformed into the clean white space that it has become. It is here in the silence of afternoons that I can finally see what I'm doing: literally having the space to step back and contemplate and because I also have electricity I can listen to music , Scarlatti, Berlioz, Brahms, Huddonit, and a very moving work by the american composer John Adams, The Transmigration of Souls.

lundi 26 avril 2010

Change



I looked and looked at the painting that I had come to think of as Salabert pool and just couldn't leave it the way it was. Each time I saw it it reproached me. I went out and looked at the site, looked at photographs and did a lot of avoidance therapy,i.e. mowing but it still bugged me that I was falling short in some way. So this is the new version. Its companion gave me hope that I might at last be able to do it differently, for a while at least. The land here-abouts is going through its annual Spring transformation and is impossible to ignore. Alas my reach falls short of the sense of it, the power of it. One has to give it a go though......