Walking with our dog

                                                              oil on canvas 169x120cms

There are a number of tips in the Guardian this week on how to be creative. My thanks.  Taking time out to walk the tracks with Daisy is akin to working whilst walking. Daisy is doing her thing: I am doing mine. Our paths cross. We both stand still a lot, just looking. Daisy has not got the hang of a camera and she might opine that neither have I but sometimes I find it useful to record something that I might later find useful. Sometimes, although the camera is in my pocket, it stays there unused on the walk. I rely on memory. Daisy on scent.  This painting is my memory at work. There is no photograph to aid this and it may well not stay as it is. The landscape is in flux and so is the painting.

 

                                             December garden. oil on canvas. 169x120cms

This is another of those paintings which have undergone numerous changes as I have tried

to get closer to the slightly claustrophobic nature of my workroom surroundings. The drawings which accompany this painting might show better the direction I want to pursue or they might send me off on a tangent. Getting to grips with drawing is essential. The focus is different but the drawings, like the paintings, never realise the image in my mind when I begin them. The same is true when I draw from life: I have an idea of how the drawing might progress but it always strays from the path and throws up new possibilities.

ink, oil, charcoal, chalk on paper. 69x39cms

                                                  ink, oil, charcoal, chalk on paper. 69x39cms

Starting afresh

garden at dusk. oil on canvas 120x120cms

There has been a hiatus with my blog and not of my choosing so I am trying to reboot it.

There are so many shifts of light on these winter days. Some of them bring memories of summer, some are curious allusions to a coming year. This painting spanned summer and winter evenings in its making.

 

Almost, nearly.

 

oil on paper. 78x60cm

So why go and paint everyday? Precisely because in doing so one can be surprised by what can happen.

This painting came together at the end of the day and I wish that I had a photographic record of the changes that preceded the final image. It will be a common place experience of many that the losses and gains of the process are unimaginable at the start. So often, when we push past what feels nearly there, we feel that the nearly there might be the best we can hope for and yet the loss begets something else, 

something perhaps really, nearly there.

Sebastien

 The fauchage, the flaying of the hedges. An annual assault on the byways, however it is to be described

 made me think of a painting and these are the beginnings. A new direction perhaps, or a dead end but at the dog end of one year and the start of a new one it was enough to get me out in the cold to look at this remnant, try to hold it in my memory while I walked and then begin the paintings. I think that I wondered how to create something monolithic from something that is, in fact, quite small. It did also bring all those artists like Mantegna, Reni, El Greco to mind. A walk in the cold does funny things to one's brain.

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 .