Steady Progress

Over the Christmas season, and despite some truly difficult weather (some of which froze the studio plumbing!), towards the objective of having some 92 canvases to exhibit in the summer coming. The dates are now fixed with an opening on Saturday 23rd July and running until late August. Although over twenty canvases are underway I always struggle with the notion of finishing a work. Habitually I alter and erase the image a number of times before it leaves the studio so on this occasion (with every piece scheduled to stay under wraps until the show at Tarpey) it means one can never be sure a photographed work is a definite until we get to mid July. However some seem to me to be resolved sufficiently to consider them ready. This one - Diseworth - is one such...whether it stays this way we will see....

Gathering More Material

Over the past few weeks I have concentrated (between bouts of feeling rather unwell) on getting on with the initial canvases whilst waiting for the first test pieces of digital printing. At last these are ready for me to collect and so soon they will be available to me in the studio. Hopefully this will have a subtle effect on the project as a whole creating a fresh dialogue between the painted and the photographed.

I am already in the process now of translating the photo collages into paint - this isn't done slavishly but rather more freehand with the studio dividing me from the production of the initial collage. For a time I have been thinking that the site of both activities might be better were it the same location. Now I'm not so sure...the distance may be helpful in rendering the image as a part of a sequence of pictures that each have their own life but can also be viewed as a whole.

One of the first two digital collages to be collected later today is depicted here. This is the deliberately crude collage that resulted from the photographic material collected in Coleorton.

Developing a Fictive Narrative through the Purely Visual

Today two parcels arrived at the door - one a new tumble dryer, the other a smaller package containing a copy of Searching For Sebald. The latter of these is in an important way the heavier of the two... As I sat pouring over the contents it slowly dawned on me that almost all my artistic endeavour over very nearly forty years (my god...) has been a endless tussle (without my realising it) between the formalism that excited me as a student and has informed much of my subsequent output on the one hand and a hitherto inchoate sense of wishing to create some form of fictive narrative buried deep within me.

Too late in life (I must suspect) I seem suddenly to understand something of what I have wanted to 'say' through the making of art - and this shifting realisation must have a profound effect on what I do from now on. It is not at all surprising now that the tensions between the formalism that dogs my painting activity and the desire to utilise photography should have surfaced in the digital collages that motivate my practice to an ever greater degree. The importance of open ended and indeterminate narrative elements within the picture plane has never seemed more relevant than they do this very morning. The crucial element in this is the importance of filtration so that the inclusion of these does not overwhelm the project as a whole.

This may seem dramatic - and maybe is so - but of course the seeds of this approach has been evident in quite a lot of the work I've done over the past decade. Particularly in the images that make up the series Le Pays Minervois. One of these works, shown above (several of which have been publically exhibited on three occasions), will go on display early in 2011 at Embrace Arts in Leicester. I am excited at the prospect that this project, fuelled by my further reading (and hopefully understanding) of the Sebald texts, may lead me onto a more rigorous realisation of my notion of a 'fictive narrative', albeit expressed through the purely visual, of the sites of NW Leicestershire.

Settling Into a Routine

is what I am having some difficulty with at present. This morning I have to put together the finishing touches to a presentation I am to give later today to students on the BA Fine Art at Nottingham University. As a taster the first image is that shown above. This is a rough composite of several photographs taken in Kegworth. I had purposely left my own village out of the first forays but with so much interruption to the project over the past two weeks or so the opportunity to get out on a particularly good day when I had other reasons to be walking my own territory was too good to miss. This is very much a 'rough cut' and may not even make it into the final selection. I am finding that I produce so many images and then make so many rough digital collages that there is a danger of overwhelming the process. The act of sending images for printing (a relatively expensive process) is a strong determinant however and hopefully will put a brake on the production flow. Each image is hopefully quite distinct and unlike every other in the project. It is this idea of singularity as regards the formal and the emotional characteristics that the body of work is intended to convey. A myriad of visual clues that only resolve themselves through the steady accretion of material.

Very soon I shall have over 20 of the canvases and 10 of the digital prints underway...sufficient number hopefully to begin to see how the totality will look.

Tough Going in Busy Times...

In the run up to our MA Photography show there is simply too much going on to make significant progress with this project. That said I now have some 19 canvases on the go...and three or four that are at, or nearing completion. But this too is a problem in one significant way - with quite a bit of my time already spent sitting at the computer, including writing this blog!, - I am loathe to spend too much more working on the digital images...and this is slowing down their production. I am anxious to keep the two forms proceeding roughly in parallel so there is catching up to do. So over the next few days I aim to push on and get at least a few of the digitals into production. Here's a taster of one of the first (Moira) that - once completed - will be off to the printers...

Busy Times

Over the past two weeks I have been engaged in two activities that have taken me away from the project for significant periods. In addition I have previously associated blogging with the purely photographic activity - it is less pressing in my mind to turn away from the painting activity and write up the blog. However in between painting seascapes on the Lincolnshire Coast and curating bunny effigies for charity I have made headway with the first dozen canvases that will eventually make up an eighth of the overall project.

The territory I have chosen to relate the works to is at last beginning to reveal itself. Inevitably by focussing on places closer to home my impressions and feelings about them are more complex and deep routed than those fleeting assessments of, for example, the Russian tundra around Archangel (the subject of a small body of work made in the early 1990's) where my period of visit was less than two weeks. As the locations are, generically, more familiar to me inevitably my interior psychological concerns as I go about press in on me more than they would as a tourist. I say generically of course as, even though I have not travelled more than fifteen or twenty miles from the house, some of the villages I had never set foot in before...strange how little we sometimes know of even our close locale.

The process of photographing and manipulating the digital photographic files has been carried out at home whilst all the painting activity takes place in the studio some nine miles and twenty minutes away. Does this disjunction aid and abet or disrupt the relationships? This is an interesting issue and one that will develop further once I have settled on some of the digital files and sent them for printing. I am close to doing this with the first half dozen and looking at the first batch of painted canvases I am close to settling on around 6 of them as resolved and completed works. Bringing the two together will be a major crunch point.

Distances

Reflecting on the distances in one's head between what you think you might make and what actually happens when you put paint to canvas in a studio. Between what you think you might photograph when on site and what you review on screen (I shoot digitally nowadays). Between what you feel might represent your experience, say, of walking through a village, and what you eventually decide can do so on a wall in a gallery. The distances between, the journeys that punctuate your reviews, ruminations and decisions, are probably a really significant part of the whole experience and yet these rambling thoughts and the images, real and imagined, are almost impossible to capture. This is the very first of the canvases that I am working on towards the 46 that will make up the painted elements of the whole project - and there is no guarantee that it will look anything like it does now when it goes onto the wall of the gallery. Indeed it is very likely that it will have been altered, erased, rethought and repainted several times over.

Lunch in Blackfordby

Looking at the map and simply deciding where to head for on a whim takes me to the village of Blackfordby - or very nearly. I park in Moira and walk back along the road towards the village. On the way I pass a very discrete sign and following it, go off down a pathway created between two fields and into a small copse. This is one of those small parcels of land that are intended to create The National Forest over the next thirty years. This one has been planted for a decade - one of those created in the first flush of enthusiasm and commitment to the project. It is a quiet tranquil spot but with these electrical pylons driven straight through the centre of it.

Although the formal characteristics of them interest and intrigue me it seems a shame that this forest environment has to be bisected in a such a brutal manner. On into the village I stop at the Bluebell Inn - although it is early days in this project it is evident that this public house is something of a rarity. It is both relatively unspoilt (unaffected by 'modernity') and - more surprisingly still - open. I have already encountered any number of rural inns boarded up and either for sale or lease. Settling into a seat at the bar I listen to the three way conversation between the landlady and two gentlemen of 'a certain age' - the only three people in the place. Evidently the landlady has a small flock of chickens that occasionally stray onto the adjoining properties - one of which is the grounds of the Methodist Church. Evidently the Minister is none too pleased but the landlady says they are all God's children and that's that. One of the old fella's suggests that "the big cock is a real Steve McQueen in the Great Escape" - there's really no answer to that observation.

First Journey

Although I know several places on my list well (and especially my own village and those near by) it is surprising how short a journey can reveal locations that I have never previously visited. For my first proper trip out I drove down the A42 to the Ashby turnoff and made for Coleorton. It is very convenient that this major route traverses the district virtually from the north east to the south west corners though in itself it has a major impact on the topography of the place.

Coleorton was, in retrospect, perhaps not the best place to start. Of course given that I do not have a specific plan of action divining what is or isn't a good location is a moot point. However the dispersed nature of this location traversed by a new road that further divided an already rambling collection of properties and other public buildings makes for a difficult visual summation. I pulled up the car at three different spots in the extended village and its environs and walked around looking for images that resonated for me. Immediately it occurred that well kept and nicely manicured middle class middle England villages do not provide substantial visual interest! In some ways this is an irrelevance - after all my aim is neither social nor topological but rather an inchoate 'sense of place' coupled to a highly personal and individual perspective on visual form and colour. But it does make for a tough ask in terms of drawing upon photographic imagery that will maintain my notion of 'singularity and invention'.

Although originally my plan was to take a settlement a week and work through locations in that timeframe I decided that maybe it is better to take a small group of villages and so moved on to Newbold, Peggs Green and Griffydam. The latter two being so closely related they share the same roadsign!

In Peggs Green I liked the formal characteristics of this wall - when processing the image later I noticed the small canvas propped against the window...a canvas that looks pretty much as if it is the size and proportions of those I shall use in the construction of the work. An omen?

From The Earth Riches

Since you asked...unless of course you have a good background in Latin. It's the official motto of the district of North West Leicestershire, in which I live in one of its villages in the Northern Parishes. And it is the chosen title for this blog - that will record the origination and creation of a series of new works for an exhibition that is scheduled to take place in the autumn of 2011.

All my recent painterly research concerns series of works. L’Irelande Del Sud and the recent ‘Le Pays Minervois, Terre de Contrastes’ play with collage, digitisation, and a mimesis of mark making. ‘Blue Note 45’s’ are small formal inventions, ‘Satantic Verses’ synthesis painterly ideas into single emotional states, my larger colour field paintings continue in much the way they have over the past seven years drawing upon diverse physical, emotional and formalist concerns. As for this series…

Much of my work has been concerned with places and times away from home. Some time back I decided to make a body of new pictures that responded to the environment in which I live. Initially there were 14 paintings completed and a further 10 underway, each named after one of the ‘northern’ settlements within the district.

Begun in 2003, the project made decent progress until my heart surgery in 2006, when it was interrupted. Following my return to health other initiatives prevented further work of the sequence and my manner of working changed with an increasing desire to integrate painting and digital photography that made it hard to follow through what had been, until then, a purely abstract painterly project. I was trying to make paintings that contained a complete visual topology within them and each one was intended to be a pure invention. A kind of constant invention and singularity was what I was after.

Although the original paintings remain stacked under a shelf in the studio the opportunity to exhibit a body of work in a gallery within the district itself prompted a rethinking. What if I expanded the sequence to include all the forty five settlements within the district and began over by visiting each, photographing my reactions and finds in them? The intention now is to create two pieces, of a uniform size and shape (30 x 40 cms, one a substantively painted piece, the other a digital image, albeit made with painted 'interventions' within it of each of the settlements.

'Ex Terra Opes' will be the result - and this blog will hopefully document and reflect the creation of the work as a whole. This first image comes from my first visit proper to some of chosen locations - Newbold.