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.
No comments:
Post a Comment