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.