Back to basics.

Focussing on the thing seen as well as the thing experienced has caused me to return to drawing directly from observation and making small paintings. At the moment the drawings are bigger and made with a stick, printing ink and white emulsion. As ever I'm hoping that one thing will feed into the other. To begin with the drawing is descriptive: it then presents me with the problem of how to activate the surface in formalist terms. The paintings vary in what I want from them. I am trying NOT to get too close to what is there (or what I think is there) but the paintings insist on looking like that space, those objects. Nothing wrong with that except that it feels too representational. I am not, I tell myself, translating the outside into paint squeezed from tubes applied to a flat surface to make a painting which refers to light and air, space and solids but is something else entirely, with its own qualities. So back to the drawing board in more senses than one.

Artistses de Montsales et du Causse.

Garden. oil on canvas. 160x120cm

The first of the seasons exhibitions at La Tour Montsales, Aveyron opens Thursday !st May at 6:00p.m.

I'll be showing this.

Failing better.

I know how this feels : the portrait is a map, a terrain to be examined, studied, learnt even, placing one foot in front of the other, losing the way, regaining it. It can't be rushed and we all have to start somewhere. Engaging with the subject is as likely to bring its disappointments as its small triumphs but this is the choice made and so confronted over and over again. Maybe, at some point it will begin to come together and perhaps a beautiful line will be made , a passage will give a direction if only it can be recognized. There is no safety in staying within bounds so each attempt has to be made anew as if, as if seeing the face for the first time, as if putting down that first mark for the first time. That is what we do, one step at a time and with luck we will fail better.

Eleven garden paintings: towards an understanding. In which the painter looks but may not understand what to make of it.

oil on wood panel. 50x50cm.

oil on canvas. 50x50cm

oil on paper. 25x25cm.

oil on canvas. 30x30cm.

                                                                    oil on paper 25x25cm.

                                                                oil on paper 25x25cm.

                                                                      oil on paper.25x25cm.

                                                                oil on wood panel 50x50cm.

                                                                  oil on canvas, 20x20cm.

                                                                   oil on paper. 25x25cm.

                                                                   oil on paper.25x25cm.

oil on paper 25x25cm.

This is a tricky period.  There are all sorts of things churning around in my head and the outcome may

not have anything to do with these small paintings but may be kickstarted by them. Do I want to paint landscape? No I do not. Do I want to be affected by landscape? Hard to avoid it.  Do I want to acknowledge that it has been the one thing ocurring in all my painting so far? Yes, no, yes . So what now? 

Well the painting is the thing and I am not a figure painter and I am not someone who wants to paint objects and their interaction with space and I am not an abstract painter at all. I am however interested in a good story and it seems to me that there is a good story in the land and our occupation of it and its occupation of us. A walk then comes to mind; bok (anglo saxon boec), beech (writing on), track, way, mapping, story telling. A short hop to picture making and recording or expressing sensation. It is now that we must have truck with the image and the making of the image. To ask what it is and what it does and how it does it. I choose paint but it is paint which must be made to serve the telling of the story which is both of itself (the act of painting) and of the thinking involved. There is an element of me being in the land and the land being in me. I have an exterior, interior  and anterior landscape and the act of painting is an attempt to pull them together so that I may understand. Making a mark on the terrain that is my painting/drawing shifts dynamics in my head . It isn't just my hand at work. Further more there is the distinction to be made between making paintings and making pictures. One of them has formalist concerns of shape, line, value, colour ,texture, pace etc and the other I think might be about something more inchoate, as a conversation begun but not completed. I am reminded of something attributed to David Park.... that accepting and immersing myself in subject matter I paint with more intensity and that the "hows" of painting are more inevitably determined by the "whats`'.

Gardening - late winter.

late winter/ early new year. oil on canvas. 50x50cm.

two trees. oil on canvas. 160x120cm.

Two paintings, one of which I keep returning to, one new, turning over the surface and moving things around. Gardening and painting, two compatible ideas. During that slow gestation period, deep resting, some settle into catalogues, order their seeds, others re-visit the site of battles lost and won, look for signs of re-newal.

Not giving a damn

ghost in the making. oil on canvas. 50x50cm.

I was reflecting on the notion of not giving a damn whether anyone sees what I do or not and whether I meant it. Fresh from reading The Art Fair by David Lipsky, and being amused by the story of the need to be seen and being seen to be seen, I am the very worst of self promoters because of course this, here, is what I am doing but doing it in a relatively defendable way. There is no one (other than my wife)  coming to my painting and offering criticism face to face.  I can post an image and walk away. 

Sharon Knettle sharonknettell.blogspot Painting from Life posted a piece from Jed Perl which is worth reading and the I found by chance something written by the actor James Cromwell. Both of these observations are relevant for all of us who work day in day out on our own and work because to not do so would pose an even bigger risk to ourselves.

From Jed Perl,

What happens to an artist whose development receives so little public recognition? I am not talking about unfulfilled promise. I am referring to artists who have done an immense amount and now, at mid-career, are at the point where they have to find it within themselves to do even more. Can artists keep on doing their damnedest when the wide world doesn't give a damn.

                                                                  
From James Cromwell,

The antidote to this malaise exists, as it always has, in immediate felt experience, full self-expression, the inspiration of the imagination, the power in the collective celebration of the ecstatic, and the revolutionary potential of all art to transform the commonplace into the miraculous. All this is anathema to the status quo, and a dire threat to the agendas of power. “To hold the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure” is today an act of insurrection. In our drug addicted, violence prone, greed induced and celebrity besotted culture, where the one tenth of one percent have a stranglehold on the organs of communication, it is imperative to raise our collective voice in resistance. 

and so to the idea of looking at and making a portrait. Think of this: Every portrait exposes a truth that rides on the inherent lies. Our existence is transitional and subjective and this is the condition that portraiture tries to absolve. Every portrait then is a fight or, you could say prayer, that calls out from the most troubled condition of our humanity. Portraiture wants what cannot be had. Life to stop without being dead. It is an art with a built in condition of failure and that is why it is so interesting.

Debra Brehmer. Director National Portrait Gallery, London.

Birthday portrait. One year on.

                                                                
                                                              oil on canvas. 60x40 cm.



I have been working a lot on the things that I might show this summer in the autoportrait exhibition at La Tour de Montsalès in the Aveyron. There will be three other painters, Patrick Laroche, Daniel Lefranc and Charles de Rodat showing paintings and drawings.
Nothing is settled yet but this one might be in it, along with the painting made on my birthday last year. There are seven months to go yet : time to come up with something else. Time to consider more fully the space in a painting and how it can appear to push and pull . There is a very interesting post by Ilaria del Turco regarding architects use of space in a new exhibition at the Royal Academy in London.