Thick and fast

Which does describe how these are made but they are remade several times until it starts to feel as if it is working, so in truth not so fast, as there is a lot of time when the brain is ticking over before the paint is applied. If, as it seems, these are becoming closer to the subject ( someone commented that they were less abstract but I think not) it is because the hook is obvious and is likely to remain the focus of my attention for some while yet and the painting will take its own course. I can live with that.

A late nod to Constable and Freud.

And a host of others too since one of the many is Diebenkorn, but what is the problem to be addressed? The tree is not the problem: the tree is the armature upon which to build the painting and I think this holds true for me when, for example, I make a self-portrait and my face serves as the hook upon which I hang the paint. Sometimes it looks the way I look: sometimes the paint becomes a tree.

Colour sometimes works to confound recessional space so when I look at part of the tree (the trunk) and the space surrounding it,painting that can result in three flat sections, each with its own presence. This morning the trunk was a grey blue red but this afternoon it may be a pale green.

Further studies. The trunk of a tree.

The hard part for me is holding on to the flatness of the image in these. As I have mentioned before, there is a strong sense in the garden of the stage flat, the tilting towards me which is of course at variance with the idea of recessional space. I can get near to it in the drawings but the use of colour creates its own problems. Letting go of some aspects of the way that I put paint on is another issue. I was also amused to uncover Lucien Freud"s version of Constable's Study of the trunk of an elm tree.c.1821 in the Victoria and Albert Museum. amongst my papers

Not yet.....

But if ever I became an art thief, this would be high on my list. A wall in Naples. Thomas Jones, c.1782.

Three studies for another conversation.

In painting the space outside my window, a space which shifts backwards and forwards as my perspective changes, I am aware of how limited my focus can be. We think of the grand sweep, the eyes scanning the view left and right, up and down, backwards and forwards but my view is often limited to that moment before the sweep and before my brain brings all that a-priori knowledge into play. I have commented before upon how flat (like stage flats) the view can seem and it is especially so at this time of year with such bright light on the land.

Liberals Are Killing Art

How the Left became obsessed with ideology over beauty. 

I must thank my friend Sharon Knettle for pointing me to this article in The New Republic by Jed Pearl. it was an interesting adjunct to Seeing Through Berger by the late Peter Fuller which I read following on from reading a lot of Berger myself over the years. Peter Fuller edited Modern Painters which was eagerly awaited in our household once upon a time.

Emerging and not emerging

Thinking about what painting is and what it does and what the painter wants and makes happen I was interested in how critics read intentions into painting, often proffering a reading which does not allow for, or goes beyond the simple fact of being in the moment. That there is no more than the subject, the recognition of it and the interchange in paint. It is the paint which is essentially both the transiting vehicle and the subject. Heidegger talks of the subject emerging and not emerging in his writing about Van Gogh's painting of shoes. His is a phenomenological interpretation. In my painting and drawing of the bush, the resulting image is not the bush itself, not even the space out of which the bush emerges and not even my experience of the bush but rather the bush as paint.

A continued conversation with the little bush.

Most of the business of painting is doggedness, a determination to see what more can come of repeated looking, whether it be the ongoing dialogue with the object observed or with the object being made. One can never have too much information or else one would have to invent it but that does not prevent changes being made: I'm thinking of how John Constable would move a willow or change the scale of something to further the composition. Editing becomes necessary often: the painting requires it. The bush is the focus of these paintings and to make it so requires suppressing a lot of information but extracting a lot too.