The bush and garden.

100x80cms

150x120cms

150x120cms

162x130cms

The number of times that I have thought that I could move on from the
 bush and the garden have brought me no further: there is it seems, so much more to gain. Artists return again and again to their subject. The fact of doing so gives me a lifeline. I have spent sixteen years now in this small landscape, watching and feeling the changes in it and in me. It will of course outlast me but whilst I am in it, it is in me and that engagement continues to hold me close.

In the thick of it.

                                                       large garden. oil on canvas.72x56 ins

I read a piece today about being in the painting which seemed about right. Also it feels right that being in the painting is conjoined with being in the thing painted and that the painting is in me. I noted before that I have taken to work up close to the support so that I try to immerse myself in the process of painting, of the texture and touch and only see the whole later, when of course it could be all wrong.

January painting

I began these paintings before the New Year but they have only come together since January.  There have been several drawings made during their construction and it really has been an attempt, in the drawings, to concentrate on the marks and to allow the image to arrive on its own. However, the paintings are to do with other kinds of mark, tracks on a field, shadow and light.

Five hedges

One of the many interesting things about working from a narrow aspect, in this case, a door/window of narrow proportions, is that, due to the closeness of my self to the surface and the closeness of the outside to the inside, is that often, I am not sure what I am looking at and because of that, the marks on the surface start to have a life of their own, related to but not of the hedge, in this case. I like that. I like that one can just let go of it. I observe the hedge, sometimes that is all I do in a day and then start to make something that is itself primarily.

New paintings after walking.

sudden break. oil on paper. 68x70cm

after grey skies. oil on paper 78x60cm

clearing. oil on paper 78x60cm

shift. oil on paper. 68x70cm

   

ground. oil on paper 78x60cm

Hill. oil on paper. 78x60cm 

The idea of walking and making go hand in hand throughout the visual arts along with the written word. I don't need to retail who and where but never the less I think it remains a pertinent correlation. We walk and experience walking and weather, light and colour. Rilke has it thus:

My eyes already touch the sunny hill

going far beyond the road i have begun

So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp,

it has an inner light, even from a distance

and changes us, even if we do not reach it,

into something else, which, hardly sensing it

we already are; a gesture waves us on

answering our own wave

but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

Two field edge paintings.

oil on paper. 78x60cms

Climbing a track near to my home, a field becomes tilted, almost like a theatre set back drop. I often stand and watch the light and shadow move across it and now, at this time of year, just before ploughing, the edges blur with new growth. Everything shifts slightly, and then the plough slices it into sharp shapes once more.

Five paintings from above a field edge.

                                      

                                                     all oil on paper. 87x60 cms

I made these after a long walk, my regular walk by a field edge and on returning home they seemed the obvious thing to set down. Following these I went to the National Gallery in London in search of Thomas Jones and his paintings from Naples.  For anyone interested, he was born in 1742 and made some remarkable paintings during his tour of Italy, quite unlike his work before or after.