Lost and found.

oil on canvas. 160x120 cms.

There come times when painters feel that what they are doing is somehow arbitrary, that the marks are too subject to chance and that the work is too soon over. This is the something that one wants to strive against: to be in control some of the time whilst acknowledging that once started, the painting process throws up surprises. I for one would not want to know how it ends.

There is a sense of arriving and leaving, moving away, losing in order to gain.

Here is a piece from Rilke:

Who turned us round like this, so

that,

No matter what we do, we have

the air

Of somebody departing? As a

traveller

On the last hill, for the last time

seeing

All the home valley, turns, and stands, and lingers,

so we live, forever taking leave.

Nothing to do with painting but......

This is still something akin to beauty.

Unquiet landscape.

in progress, oil on wood panel. 150x150 cms.

Landscape painting has always been about what it is like to be in the world and in a particular condition. Landscape painting catches at those unexpected ideas and emotions that come, and so easily go, on days of no particular importance. It shows life not as a development but as a condition.

I have been reading and recommend highly, Unquiet Landscape, Places and Ideas in 20th Century English Painting. The author is Christopher Neve. Published by Faber and Faber. 1990.

In search of the self.

Charcoal on paper. 80x50 cms.

In the same way that not every painting of a man,woman or child is a portrait, not every portrait is intended to be recognised as such but there is an adventure, the adventure perhaps of seeing something unknown appear each day in front of the mirror. We approach the surface to be worked upon with a sense of setting out, of seeing what will happen, under scrutiny, sometimes working quickly, other times revisiting the same drawing or painting until it feels right. But no two are the same.

Thanks to the photograph, we think we know what we look like: but I think that the act of making the image in front of the mirror allows us to find out what we feel like when doing so.

oil on wood. 40x25 cms.

.

A common experience.

oil on canvas. 80x80 cms.

Making any painting, however enjoyable it is, inevitably poses questions about the value of the commitment. None of the people I know are so self assured that they do not ask themselves about this. One makes something and then one makes something else and even if it seems like stepping stones to something it can be difficult to say what that something is. Maybe the journey is indeed the important thing. And so is failing. Failing is one thing:failing well another. When I am asked about my painting I cannot find words adequate to the task of answering or rather the words can be corrupting and get nowhere near the sense of the ambition. A common enough experience I imagine.

A fresh start. Four small paintings that might lead somewhere.

These four paintings began following some small paintings on paper, once again an outcome of observing small patches of terrain whilst walking.

I have been trying to keep the surface alive and allow the pentimenti to be influential. Imagining this first painting on a much larger scale of course leads one to ask how certain areas would work and whether more erasure would be needed, or whether further saturation of certain areas would be obvious once the scale increased.

Even with a small piece like this, I work with the surface flat and have no preference for which way is up. That decision will come later.

oil on canvas. 46x39 cms.

oil on canvas. 50x50 cms.

oil on canvas. 30x30 cms.

oil on canvas, 30x30 cms.

Five new paintings.

Changeable weather. Oil on panel. 150 x 150 cms.

Where the wood opens out. oil on canvas. 160 x 120 cms.

untitled. edge of wood. oil on canvas. 50 x 50 cms.

untitled, edge of woods. oil on canvas. 30 x 30 cms.

untitled. oil on canvas. 80 x 50 cms.

Gerald Finzi. 1901 - 56.

The artist is like the coral reef insect, building his reef out of the transitory world around him and making a solid structure to last long after his own fragile and uncertain life.