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.