Poster or posts.

When I first moved here I spent a number of years in the cellar ( not in trouble but the only place to work) and began each day painting the view from the window, the changing light, the weather. The practice was good for me and it raised as many questions as answers, probably more of the former. It was an isolated existence and discipline akin to sitting down each day to write: I liked the silence.

It was during this period that I was invited to exhibit and published a poster. That poster led to my very first sale here, to someone who happened to see the poster and knew that she had to have the painting. That sale led to others and gave me the confidence to continue. Yet making these posts has not been with pecuniary advantage in mind, it has been more like a diary that shares ideas and seems to strike a chord with people who check in on it. So it was quite a surprise recently to be asked to sell two paintings directly from the blog. Of course lots of people set up sites expressly to do this but for me it was different and hugely encouraging and I am very grateful to that person. It is true that I have thought of stopping, it's not an uncommon feeling for anyone persuing something, wondering what exactly is the point of it all.

Among these small paintings I have aimed for something simple yet simple still takes days to achieve, in silence, in isolation but no longer in the cellar.

Birthday selfies and a visit.

  

                                                       Here is one that will register 68.

and this at 58.

This week I will be receiving a visit from Rene Caussanel whose work can be seen here http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xvfzr0_rene-caussanel_creation Rene is an artist who knows about drawing. I went to see him last week and had my  portrait drawn, which is the first time that has happened to me. Scutinizing oneself is one thing but quite a different experience being on the receiving end of another persons  piercing gaze. Martin Gayford describes sitting for Lucien freud in Man with a blue scarf. published by Thames & Hudson.

Being wrong and right: some small winter paintings.

                                                              oil on card. 30x30cm

                                                              oil on paper. 30x18cm

                                                   ink and emulsion on paper. 80x60cm

oil on paper. 30x18cm

I wrote a piece a while ago entitled, Landscape doesn't go any where, and I was wrong because of course it is going somewhere all the time. It builds up and it gets ground down and it moves, often slowly , sometimes not.

We engineer it and given time it reclaims itself. It knows nothing of our endeavour and yet I still feel that we construct it mentally and emotionally no less so in painting which, in my case , is a landscape as metaphor in flux. I build it up and break it down. No painting is immune to my depredations. If they leave to go somewhere else then they are I suppose, inviable but if they stay with me then they are subject to change, not always for the better but that is the risk one takes.

Small garden works on paper.

                                        

small garden.oil on paper. 18x12cm

     

Garden drawing.(Stipa) ink and emulsion on paper.80x60cm

                                         Garden drawing (Stipa). ink and emulsion on paper. 80x60cm

                                                                                     

ink and emulsion on paper.80x60cm

As a post script to the last post I have added these because the marks that can be derived from vegetation must be useful to me and I'll be interested to see where this leads.

New drawings from the edge of woods.

ink on paper. 60x40cm

ink on paper. 60x40cm

ink and emulsion on paper. 23x23 cm

ink, emulsion on paper.23x23cm

ink, emulsion on paper 18x12cm

Path. ink on paper.60x40cm

Woods edge, ink on paper.60x40cm

They say that a week is a long time in politics and the same can be said of drawing, plus, it makes my arms ache. These drawings develop a life of their own as I make them and they appear to me as more than the place that they come from: they are a sense of the place in as much as the activity of drawing creates marks independent of the site. In fact the site becomes the drawing for me and the drawing becomes the site. I used  pieces of hardwood of different lengths, printing ink, emulsion, palette knife, plasterer's tool and a wire brush for these because I thought that if I relied on charcoal or pencil some thing predictable would occur but actually the often random, accidental marks that these other implements make serves just as well.

New paintings in winter.

                                        

                                                              oil on canvas. 50x50cm.

  I am making a painting, a collation of lots of photographs, and of memory and to begin with, it is too pretty, too close to the subject, to the sight seen of trees at the edge of the wood in sunlight and not at all what I want. It does not strike me as painting: it seems like it is too easy to make something that appears clever and there are already too many clever paintings around. So I repeatedly paint it out and begin again thinking about what painting is and trying to marry my experience of being there with constructing a painting which is about marks, shapes, colour, line, mass etc.

                                       

                                     oil on canvas.80x80cm.

                                         

                                                                        oil on paper. 30x30 cm

                                      

                                                                            oil on paper. 30x18cm.

Winter is a time for reflection: a time to pull out the past years work for review, to decide what is worth keeping and what is not. These last few years I have made a book at the years end to record some of the things that I have done which means that I don't have to keep the paintings and can re-use them, for when all is said and done, they are simply surfaces to think on.

                                       

                                              

                                      

                               

New year, new work.

I always start the year with optimism. What other way can there be for the likes of us? I do though have to smile at my self for this almost childish naivety as one would think that experience would forewarn me. Yesterday I spent the afternoon looking from one painting to another adjusting this one and painting out that one, looking through my photographs, chiding myself to determine what I was about and then made these.

Of course it comes from a wellspring of landscape or inscape experience but if I could be sure that it was about painting too I would think that that would be enough to go on and to keep going on which, of course, we must. Happy new Year.