New /Old landscape painting.

  
                                                  Hedge. oil on canvas. 160x120cms.


Starting a new painting is like taking up with an old friend: time has passed and what one thought one knew has been challenged by the interval. Beginning again is often about learning a new perspective. One thinks that the ground is familiar and indeed it is but there is often new stuff which comes out in the course of the renewed conversation.

This is very much how it feels with the last two paintings. I am familiar with the source material, the world outside my window, the paths around me, the photographs that I have taken, the actions of my hand and eye and yet something unexpected can happen, something not seen previously. It may be just a small thing or an accretion of small things which adds to my understanding.

I was in England recently: didn't see any shows but in a friends house saw a small painting, a still life, the result of his contemplation of painting, which made me anxious to return to work. In another friends house two drawings, one by John Minton and one by John Muscutt which re-affirmed my sometimes shaky recognition of fine drawing.

Small encounters add up.

Six days on.

oil on canvas. 50x50cms.

oil on canvas. 160x120cms.

In the last six days I have read more of Elkins's, What Painting is and really feel that something has connected. Working on a self portrait, my mind has constantly ranged over the things that he has proposed. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Go forth and buy it, all of you.

If paintings could count.

If paintings could count they would just say the number one over and over again: each would insist upon it's own uniqueness. These three paintings, following on from the previous drawings, looking out of the window, are still that fleeting glimpse of the imagined work, which on quickly turning to catch sight of it, disappears.

110x30cms

110x45cms

110x45cms

This post is to recommend What Painting Is, by James Elkins, published by Routledge. There is a sense he says, that counting happens in painting, in the sense of the way marks exist together making sets and groups. There is no way to tell in advance how they might relate together and each mark is unique. I know that once that mark has been painted over, it is gone and cannot be retrieved. However each set or group consists of two separate elements existing together yet making something new. 1+1= 1.

The Flounder and the garden.

120x50cms

80x80cms

120x40cms

80x50cms.

  Can one trust ones teacher?  The garden surrounds my workplace and invades my thinking to the extent that I must address it and make use of it.  In this case I decided to look at a part of the garden and think of what I could learn from it - what it might teach me- and move me forward. I have a history of painting and like all history it is subject to review and re-writing. For me this means repainting. I ask myself if this means I have learnt something along the way. In a painting show my work was once described as being about lives lived, about caring very much for lives lived: but it wasn't my life that was being lived. So I am returning to the garden where I do live and trying to be receptive to what I think I see there. It is not going to change the world but it might change me.                                                                

A gentle plea for chaos.

light rain, wind and sun. oil on paper. 150x150cms.

Because that is how it seems to be. The state of chaos out of which one tries to construct order. Yet in the midst of this is something that I for one need to recognise: I have been thinking about what painting is and does (I have touched upon this before) and, if I can narrow it down to landscape based painting, what Kenneth Clarke speculated upon in his comments on the future (then 1947) of landscape painting.
"Can we escape from our fears by creating once again the image of an enclosed garden? It is a possible way of life: is it a possible basis for art?" He concludes that it is not: that Science has taught us that the idea of the enclosed garden of the fifteenth century, based upon a living idea of a friendly and harmonious nature is not the case and that nature is the reverse and that we shall not recover our confidence in her until we have learnt a great deal more.
 So can we find a more imaginative approach and discover a new sense of unity with the world? Some biologists argue that there is hope, E.O.Wilson is one, and I am reading The Origins of Virtue, by Matt Ridley for another view but Wilson describes a dilemma as "the machine in the garden": The natural world is the refuge of the spirit, remote, static, richer even than human imagination. But we cannot exist in this paradise without the machine which tears it apart. For him, the role of science, like of art, is to blend exact imagery with more distant meaning and the unique province of the artist is to offer images which represent a reparation in the spiritual realm. So out of the chaos that we might begin with in the process of painting, the myriad problems of looking, editing, contemplating comes a reordering and an understanding of what it is that we can extract and develop.

Painting what you see ?

I am always looking out of the window - which got me into trouble at school -trying to make sense of what I am seeing. The scene is always shifting and the act of drawing and painting is often about trying to pin down this movement. A bodily shift forwards or backward alters everything. Somewhere in the process of looking and fixing a decision is made consciously or not about what the interaction with seeing and doing is about. If one decides that one wants to set down what one sees a decision must be made as to how. The complication for me is in the what. What is it? a drawing? what is that? A painting? There is no comfort in the definition of the two.

ink, emulsion on paper. 96x57 cms.

oil on wood panel, 50x50cms.

I have been looking out  at the space framed by the window: light changes, there is movement, I move. There are no plumb lines and no marks on the floor or upon the glass (although that might help) and I am not entirely sure of what it is that I am seeing or where it is. Sometimes objects appear different: their size, density and colour changes as I work through a period of time. Is this painting what one sees?

Summer painting holiday.

This is where I have been in the last few weeks. 

The result of engaging with the drawings that I have already posted has been this: I didn't imagine the consequence of drawing would bring me here and when I was asked the other day whether it was a painting about light on the hill by the house, I knew that that observation was about right. I just had not made it my goal, which is not to say that I was unaware of the influence. This seems a small painting to me and would very much like to make something bigger now.

 

                                                   oil on paper on board. 125x125 cms.



Everyone is encouraged to take along holiday reading, soI have brought Straw Dogs,Thoughts on Humans and other animals. John Gray. Granta Books. After which I do need a holiday.