Hill.

There is a hill that I can see, past the red ash in my garden. The colours can change dramatically during the days. Cool mornings, hot evenings.
Whilst I have been painting out of doors I decided to make the top one here by going and looking but coming inside to paint. It is an interesting and well established ( once upon a time) practice and is helping me pare the mass of  information to the point where I might just see the painting and not the hill.

Sincerity and Authenticity

It is that time of year: heat and dust, heaviness of leaf as well as the air itself. I am at work on some more paintings of the red ash tree in my garden . Simple stuff really without recourse to the concerns of painting now as in Jed Perl's piece ( The Perils of Painting Now ) in The New York Review of Books which I was alerted to by the painter Sharon Knettle. After a long hard look this morning I wondered ( aloud as I am always talking to myself) if I was now too close to the subject to extract what I needed to make a painting which had in fact some integrity and that elusive authenticity. I am a figurative painter if I am anything: however that should not stand in the way of the painted surface and that transformation and connection between what is seen and what is made. I am not trying to represent what I look at, which is why I worry at becoming too close to doing that, but I am using the act of looking to extract something that can be in the mix that becomes the painting. Braque was well able to take the studio space that he experienced and transform it in the process of painting.

Post Brexit blues.

In the week following the sex, lies and videotape that was Brexit I painted this. enough said I think.

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.