Post Exhibition Reflection

Well didn't it turn out well....

The exhibition

Here are some shots of the installed work (for all those who cannot make it to the gallery) and some reflections on the project as a whole. Overall I feel confident that I pretty much achieved what I set out to do - to create a body of work that speaks to the locality I live and work in, to produce a series of inter related pictures that have both their own singularity, personality and character on the one hand and some sort of collective integrity on the other. The separation of the digitally produced collages (and the small selection, six, of the same) made more sense of the process and the use of the purely photographic images as postcards (an idea that I cannot claim as entirely my own!) tied the whole together. Of course some pictures could be stronger - particularly as the deadline loomed decisions for worse (and occasionally) better made the corpus more uneven than ideally I would have wished. But overall as an exercise in a form of visual psycho-geography and as a body of paintings I am happy.

Over and Done With...ish...

If you have followed this saga to this point then you probably know that the show finally opened this past weekend. At last I am catching up on things and want to post some images and reflections in the next day or so. One might think the work is done but just as I was settling into some new work in the studio yesterday I got a call from the Leicester Mercury (the 'local' evening paper) asking me to pitch up to the gallery for a feature. Today I fielded calls from a listings magazine and Leicestershire Life, a monthly glossy, both of which wanted copy and images. All good PR but eating into the painting time!

Still I am now focussed on my Conversation Pieces, something I've been working on for two years now, but which took a back seat during the latter stages of FTEW. Its a relief to be working on a larger size again!

Off and running

Just about to go and collect the work from the studio and deliver to the gallery...hopefully all will be at least touch dry! The genesis of this project goes back quite a way... some earlier pictures, not of uniform size and on board, with significant amounts of collage and yet based on the notion of each representing a location nearby were started in the early 00's. The picture above was taken in the Art School at Derby where 4 or 5 of these earlier pictures were exhibited around 2004 or 5.

My decision to exhibit the photo/text pieces as postcards in traditional postcard racks creates quite a bit of additional wall space in the show. I'm tempted to dig out some of this earlier series as a counterpoint to those on display in the larger room. We'll see how it goes in the gallery...

Here's the Invitation!

If you can, please come along on Saturday 16th July from 6 to 8pm. More details from the Tarpey website

Beginning of the Endgame

It's that Beckett moment... yesterday I revised four paintings, discarded one and let three be. The addition of copious amounts of Liquin should ensure they dry sufficiently to be transported from the studio to the gallery next Monday morning. Some fifty seven canvases will be pared down to the forty five that will make up the body of substantive work. I am awaiting delivery of the forty five postcards that will be the bigger part of the 'backroom' and of the three racks on which - appropriately I think - they will be displayed. In addition there may be two or three other minor 'surprises'. The studio has a fresh, mildly Scandinavian air to it now...three larger canvases sit on the walls - part of the series of 'Conversation' pieces that started two year or so back and will probably continue for another year or so. For the moment these have given me, as of yesterday afternoon, a strong sense of release...

Stubborn Brutes

There are always pictures that allude you...the ones that just won't come right whatever you think to do with them. Here's the small clutch of paintings from this project corralled together as the 'stubborn brutes' yesterday. It's a holding pen for radical surgery that some of them are getting today...

Finishing Touches

Some twelve canvases seem to be evading the finishing touches...and yet they must be done in the next two days (given adequate drying times)...so away to the studio...

The video piece and the signs that must be prescient?

Here is the link to the video piece I have made about this project. As they say Stateside - enjoy!

I've also noticed that over the past month or so shiny bright new signs have gone up at strategic entry points into the District...this is something that has never previously been on my radar - and I doubt we had any such items in the past unless I've been very unobservant as I've been going around. So in addition to my own, low key and esoteric, campaign to attract attention to this small corner of rural England the good burghers of NW Leics. have stirred themselves (as well as using our taxes!) to draw attention to the area. A good omen maybe?

Reaching the Endgame

There is now only a month or so until the exhibition opens! Hence the rather infrequent blogging - getting on with the completion of the project has taken priority of late - alongside a busier than usual schedule occasioned by the examination season in Higher Education. Some thirty two of the canvases have now been 'signed off', documented and packaged. Another twenty five or so are in various states of completion (more than enough though there are versions of several so that when they get to the walls of the gallery some selection can take place).

A decision has been taken as regards the photographic material in conjunction with Gallery Manager, Luke Tarpey. Rather than select single images from amongst the many to be displayed in the second space we have arrived at an idea of selecting short text extracts from the District Handbook that has served as a catalyst for the project. This is the 1977 edition that contains brief and mildly eccentric (certainly by current mores) descriptions of each location. One image from those shot in each location will be juxtaposed with the description text and an A4 panel presented for each of the 45. This is a fairly substantial additional task though not as demanding as I imagined it might be (I have made 27 over the past two weeks since we took the decision). There are however a few villages and one town - Coalville, the largest of the lot - where the pictures taken to date simply don't provide sufficient material from which to select. So back on the road in the next week or so!

I have also shot a short video piece about the project that - if I can master the technology - I may try and append to this blog.

Towards the Airport

Yet another beautiful day, mostly spent mopping up locations and aspects not yet covered. And the land changes in ways that are quite unexpected...six months ago two wind turbines were yet to challenge the control towers primacy on the Airport site. Look hard and you'll see them!

The Flaneur & the Flirt

Whilst away the subject of the Flaneur came up and I mused about the differences between the act of the flaneur and those of myself. I've tried to ascertain a descriptor for someone who conducts the activities of the flaneur but transposed away from the city and into the paysage. There is of course one substantive difference - the relationship to and interaction with others. By and large rural villages (and I will come to the towns in a moment) are solitary places during daylight hours (and I suspect for much of the night too). One wanders, strolls, undisturbed and the occasional interactions with others are more often than not genuine encounters of substance. I've previously blogged about one or two of these and there are others but they are exceptions to most of my perambulations. The true flaneur walks the city, drifting through the crowds, detached and aloof. In the contemporary world and popularised in the UK especially by Iain Sinclair, Will Self and Nick Papadimitriou there is, of course, the midway phenomena of 'psycho geography' that more often than not concerns itself with the suburbs. Equally detached and more alone, these wanderers are more energetic, setting themselves specific targets of ground to be covered. All of them are however essentially literary commentators. A colleague of mine from my MA studies - Ingrid Newton - transposed the notions of psycho geography (and to an extent earlier photographic practice of the 'flaneur' as best exemplified by Atget) to the photographic realm with considerable success and deserves further recognition for a complex, witty and rewarding body of work. But these are all outside of the realm of the rural. As for this most photographic work seems to be either topographic or documentary.

However this project is less photographic and more painterly, though the photograph is the chosen weapon of record, a way of augmenting memory and punctuating the physical act of painting with something that has, at the least, a simulacra of reality. The ways and means of artists in capturing, by fair means and foul, an aspect of reality that can form part of the act of painting is well documented (not least by Hockney in Secret Knowledge). In a recent introductory talk to an exhibition of Landscape art a former colleague of mine - Professor David Crouch - outlined his thesis on the idea of Flirting With Space. A substantive part of a chapter in the book rehearses ideas around the work of Peter Lanyon with regard to the contingent idea of journeys and interaction with space. I imagine Lanyon would have thoroughly engaged with the idea of Photoshop and its offer of all possibilities with the manner in which places and spaces can be manipulated and distorted. His physical collaged sculptures hint at how this might of developed but also some of his very late 2D collages (made on his last trip to the USA) where manmade material began to find its way into the work (I recall seeing a piece that incorporated a frottage of an american car numberplate into a landscape image).

As I move into the final stages of this project, the above being yet another example of the rough digital collage from which the canvases spring, I'm imagining myself as something of a paysageneur 'flirting' with space in the rural places of North West Leicestershire!

Returning to the task at hand...

This is a picture I've remade a couple of times over the past two years...it sits on the terrace in Italy a few feet from where I've been sitting most of these past couple weeks. Although I haven't been entirely idle, but rather sifting through the photographic source material I've accumulated since last summer and beginning a process of decision making about what, exactly. will comprise the publication to accompany the exhibition in July. This brought the period into sharp relief once I started to construct a publication schedule...essentially it gives me around three more weeks to complete the body of forty five canvases and a couple after that to put the publication to bed. In essence its time I was in the studio (and out on the road - there are a few pictures yet to take) rather than writing up this blog!

Getting to Grips with the 'endgame'

Over the past few days it has dawned on me that given I shall be away for the next fortnight I am getting perilously close to the beginning of end of this project. On my outline plan...a line here and there on my diary...I am scheduled to complete the photography about now - and the paintings by 24th May. Twenty seven potential working days away! I have now shot many pictures (and have but three locations to complete) and just this week have made a painting (shown here) in a single session. There are now some 60 canvases in train of which some seven are printed digital collages - I expect at the most that three more painted canvases will be added to this group and perhaps five more digital collages created. From the sixty eight works the 45 will emerge. I am now moving a fair way from the original impulses...this work, for instance, draws on a observation made in a local museum...but concerning a quite separate location within the district.

The Packington Wheel

On a superb Spring morning it is a real pleasure to be out and about - in fact the weather is positively Mediterranean and by getting an early start I was able to pull in Packington, Swannington, Hugglescote, Ellistone and Donington Le Heath. The outer reaches of the district (when viewed from the perspective of the 'Northern Parishes') are now covered bar Charley and Bardon. As I drove around I reflected on the fact that although the project was to essentially immerse myself in my own locality as source material for a sequence of images (as opposed to earlier projects that drew upon trips to far off places) I was however in a totally 'other' environment this far south. The area around Coalville is as unknown to me as - for example - the Lunigiana in Italy. One might even suggest I know the area around Aulla better, having spent maybe two dozen or more visits to it. In fact my knowledge of Coalville itself is pretty much restricted to my occasional visits to the Council Offices when I served as a District Councillor in the 1990's. As I walked around Packington on what is my first ever visit to the village I wondered whether I was as much an alien here as I was in Verpiana? The day being as beautiful as it was suggested I might already be in the Lunigiana (where luckily I will be in a week or so)...so much so that a visit to the bank seemed to posit an Italian experience where counter staff seemed so laid back in that southern european manner. All this played out as I drove from location to location with the occasional radio news reports on the tensions in the 'Eurozone' viz. the bail out of Portugal. It's interesting (to me at least) that global economics seem to rest (certainly for Europe) on the vagaries of climate...

Thoughts on Alan Davie

Very occasionally a day just seems to lead to better decision making. When one comes along its as well to keep moving, make the brushes and paint do your bidding, put down the marks as fast as circumstance allows. A recent new website (of interest to those of us wedded to abstraction) called Abstract Critical ran a lovely video interview with Alan Davie. Now 90 he suffers from still being fit and healthy and working in that because he isnt long gone the reputation isnt fixed and therefore he rarely gets the accolades his immense talent deserves. I doubt he cares much though - too busy getting on with it. Davie championed a vigorous form of abstract expressionism that was never easy and therefore not easily pigeon holed. To my mind he's always been the artist that Pollock ought to have been but never was, instead of being seduced by the process Davie kept at his autonomism, adding in imagery that informed and enriched the canvas. In the interview he reminded us of Klee's 'walk' maxim and emphasized its importance.

This is what came back to me today - sometimes one just instinctively understands what shape, what colour and what directions a line must go and when that happens you just hang in there for the ride, hoping it lasts as long as possible! It has a strange quality about it as a process in that it often seems that you have started doing it before you are conscious that it's a decision you have taken.

Davie has a particularly strong place in my artistic affections - at 14 I went into the bookshop in Exeter that was part of my regular Saturday morning routine and saw a gorgeous monograph on him. The price however was, to my mind, astronomic but I decided I had to have it...it took me over four months to garner the necessary cash, forgoing much else. It still sits on my bookshelves today, minus the dust jacket, frayed along the spine and much thumbed.

More (welcome) distractions

More time away from the studio this past weekend...but the trip was well worth it. A wee bit of 'homage' by visiting the Sailor's Reading Room in Southwold as part of a brief trip to Suffolk. Neither I or my wife know this coast at all well so it was pretty much a voyage of discovery. And despite the flatness of it this is beautiful territory - albeit bisected by Sizewell B, a fact that has more resonance at the moment than would usually be the case.

Apart from brief visits (we will be back...) to sites I know only through my acquaintance with 'The Rings Of Saturn' it was a very relaxing couple of days in which there was plenty of reflection on where the project has currently arrived at. I took delivery today of five more of the digital images and they are now being integrated into the whole. Interestingly they seem to look more and more integrated into the canvases and less and less standing out as 'different'. Why is this so? After all I have taken care to distance my work online with that in the studio but I guess some 'spillage' is inevitable.

A solitary reader occupied the Reading Room, pouring over one of the Sunday broadsheets, and it felt slightly uncomfortable to be mooching around the room whilst he relaxed over his paper. After we left we mused over whether he was actually a sailor, and if so, was that a professional engagement or enthusiastic amateur? Was he simply 'minding' the premises? Whatever - the room does have a strangely affecting ambience - a brooding sense of melancholy, so resonant of Sebald and, dare I say it, my own mood for much of my time nowadays.

Sometimes the spark just isn't with you...

and whatever you do doesn't seem to work out. And for me at least, when that is happening one starts to question the whole endeavour. Take for example the picture shown here - I was reasonably content with it a couple of weeks back when I made it. In response to the - undoubtedly correct - observation that most of the works were within the same limited scale range it was a simple way of reacting to that. OK the grid is a very obvious trope to employ but the combination of the small informal dabs of colour set against the impassive grey seemed to work for me. Today however, it joined the serried ranks of canvases that all suggested that they lacked purpose or resolution and that whatever intervention I made they , to a man, resisted coming into line. Perhaps it will all look different tomorrow - here's hoping...

The Quiet Of The Country

One of the joys of a project like this is pitching up just outside a village you have never visited on a bright early spring day and pointing the camera at whatever takes your fancy. One of my rituals is to take a photograph of the signboard as I approach a location and today I turned the camera back towards the car before I walked off in search of some further images. I have now covered well over half of the 45 habitations that feature on my 'Official Guide' map.

Besides the smaller villages I am now turning my attentions to the larger places - today besides being in Snarestone, Swepstone and the delightfully named Newton Burgoland I spent time walking the streets of Ibstock. I only shot thumbnails on my small Lumix so will have to return there later. However I was struck by the dismal condition of this small town - with very few going concerns and a general air of neglect and a certain 'down at heel' quality. If there is a forgotten heartland in England I suspect this is it. Perhaps I am wrong but it is something I shall literally focus on when I return there to shoot in earnest.

Opening Up

Of late I have been 'opening up' the process - using a variety of means - including internet sources, material from the original source publication, mixing up the media and now, even experimenting with the supports. In part this is of a piece with the liberating strategy of halving the number of required works for the final display and in truth it is probably also a desire to experiment more within the format. If the final product is to exhibit the 'singularity' of each image then this is not only highly desirable but absolutely vital. Above is 'Castle Donington' as the rough digital collage...at the moment being bowdlerised in painting form...which one of these will make it into the final selection?

A week or so ago Newsnight featured the work of writer Nick Papadimitriou whose notion of 'Deep Topography' seems to chime with my own procedures in creating the body of work that will be "From The Earth Wealth'. Apart from a brief 'googling' I've yet to fully engage with Nick's work but I'm fairly sure it will impact on my thinking over the latter stages of my project. Meanwhile the pictures are proceeding, mutating and being joined by fresh canvases. At the moment various media and tools are the focus of my attention.

Deviation

Moving an image away from its source is always a little fraught. But more often than not the bold move is the best. Taking a fully loaded brush to virtually one third of a canvas covers it in a dark brown, almost a black, shape that forms an arc imposing itself onto what is still a recognisably landscape image, albeit one into which a strange colour wheel is forcing its way from another corner. However this dark space now has to be reanimated and having dispensed with the original referents the way is open for something entirely unconnected to the initial impulse.

I'm finding myself meditating more and more on the less illuminated corners of painting practice over the past century or so. Undoubtedly this puts me at odds not only with much contemporary art activity (in which the whole of painting is fairly ghettoised) but also with many of my fellow painters. In part the act of non representation is quite unfashionable particularly where it is divorced from process, and because the references are so far away from the current mainstream. I am drawn more and more towards the work of Paul Klee and of artists for whom his example was especially important. Werner Haftmann noted that Klee was often thought of as something of a maverick 'one off' but actually he formed something of a touchstone for quite a number of painters, Bissiere paramount amongst them but through him Manessier and his friend the little known (in the UK certainly) Gustave Singier. I recalled a small motif from a Singier canvas ( seen somewhere in a chapel in rural France i think) that he abstracted from a harbour scene in Holland that quite randomly popped into my head as I toyed with what to fill the dark space...and so it appears.

Sitting looking at it, painted in a muted blue mixed with prussian and zinc, I realise that the original image was taken from a twilight photo over a small manmade lake near home ( we have quite a number within a few miles of us). Of course its a fishing lake rather than one with boats and masts but the associative connection pleases me momentarily.

The picture for this posting comes from a mobile phone photo taken in the studio that creates a random yet equally pleasing effect of the work in progress.

Viewing The Land

Another bright morning - and only mid February - out in Worthington mopping up the other end of this village. I did intend to travel south but the weather conditions and the traffic on the A42 conspired to make this less than attractive, Snarestone will have to wait whilst Belton is gathered in. Strangely enough I'm due to visit Belton later today with my wife for a meal to celebrate Valentine's Day. So two visits in one day to a place I've probably only set foot in less than half a dozen times in 24 years. I'm beginning to find a passion for simple landscape images, perhaps because the weather is improving and the flora and fauna awakening from winter slumbers. In addition to visits to the villages (and why haven't I tackled the towns yet I wonder?) I want to stop and view the land in a more clearcut topographic way. Why this is so I'm not sure but it allows me to be more overtly romantic in outlook and in the results - not entirely unreasonable on this day!

Thinking it through

Driving back from the marvellous Bill Gear exhibition in Stow the other day I got to thinking hard about the show of this project. Although I have some forty or so works underway I was beginning to feel quite pressured by the need to complete 90...according to my initial rough plan that was arrived at by multiplying the 45 locations by two (an oil and a digital piece). The size of the gallery was also troubling me - however I looked at it the two main walls seemed ridiculously overcrowded in my mind's eye.

So I rethought the space earlier this week, remeasured and - surprise! - if I rehang to accommodate three high on each wall in two rows of eight on the longer and seven on the shorter...it means 45 can be displayed - one for each location. Not only does this obviate some of the pressure it will enable me to select down from a larger number of canvases with a regard to the totality of the image within the space.

Sometimes it pays not to be too rigid in one's thinking...

Pictures attached... Isley Walton and general view of the studio in early February

Letting Go

Fresh supplies of paint and new brushes combined with a desire for faster progress have seen the project move forward with new vigour. An effort to push the processes into new places is also in evidence - necessitating calls upon the knowledge of what has gone before. One canvas currently owes as much to a close reading of a Cezanne I saw earlier in the week at the Courtauld as it does the source images from the chosen location. Dark blues clash with a pungent cadmium orange overlaid by an equally fierce emerald green. Allowing these more intense colour schemes into the work takes the pictures firmly out of the representational arena - rural Leicestershire in the deep winter rarely reveals such strong colour intensity. However this is not a body of pictures of the topography of the district but more my personal exploration of what painting can be more than a century after cezanne made Le Lac D' Annecy. Much the same can be said of a memory of the button on a coat in a painting by Vincent Van Gogh...see below...!

Conversations

Conversations in two of this week's locations - Appleby Magna and Stretton en le Field - encapsulate two of the important themes that lie behind the project. In Appleby I meet a man walking his dog (in many of the villages to date, the 'man walking the dog' is the only person I encounter other than workers of some kind, the postman, the builder). Unbidded he begins an exposition on the local history, not least on the local dignitary, Sir John Moore, with whom he has a beef over his involvement in slavery through the East India Company. Grudges, it seems, are carried a long time in rural Leicestershire! But his radical political views (scrap the Lords etc.) and keen sense of history chimes with my own feelings that each location and every image ought to be neither a view, nor even a representation of, each place I visit. Rather it is the sense of history and events, both in the past and present, of details observed and recorded, that make up the shapes, colours and handling of each picture when I return to the computer to upload and manipulate the images made, and then eventually translate these in the studio to paint.

In Stretton I chance upon a single soul, a younger man leaving his parent's property. Initially I think he is drawn to have a conversation as the village is so tiny, a collection of quite grand houses strung out along a single cul de sac, that strangers are a rare occurrence. But it turns out he is a professional photographer, specialising in advertising work making pictures primarily of cars. We have a long discussion on the changing nature of photography, on the ubiquity of the medium, on the ways in which the advent of digital compacts have demystified production of the significant image. It occurs to me after we go our separate ways that my slavish adherence to the quality DSLR and the lenses that I lug around with me may be wholly unnecessary to my purposes - at least in part if not in whole. After all my purposes are fleeting engagements with particular details and moments not a purely topographical record. Quite how this will effect the latter stages of my project I'm not yet sure. But as retrace my steps through Stretton I find myself reaching for the iphone in my pocket and shoot some images with the various picture apps I have on it...

Worthington

Several more locations visited earlier this week in the brief interlude between thick grey cloud blanket. Although there is yet time some twenty plus locations have yet to be photographed and given that the loose deadline I set myself for this part of the project is fast approaching (I intended to have all my source images completed by end of February) it was important to get some completed this week. I have commented before that it is perhaps surprising how ignorant one can be of places maybe only a few miles and minutes from one's home. On this occasion I found myself wandering through parts of villages I didn't even know existed.

As a topographical exercise I have been recording each of the places of worship and each pub I have come across. A rather sad aspect of this has been the number of pubs that are boarded up...usually within the last few years, months or even weeks. Given that quite a few of the smaller villages have no retail facilities (or post office etc.) pubs might be the one and only sign of life in a tiny hamlet. Certainly all three villages on this trip were utterly silent during the period from 11 in the morning till three thirty in the afternoon. This lends an eerie and elegiac feel to one's meanderings...and especially to the sounds around. In such rural locations sound takes on new significance - from at least a mile away I heard approaching horses and riders - who took twelve or fifteen minutes to pass me. How one can encompass such aural experience in what is essentially a visual project needs much thought.

Village Life

Although the paintings are coming along well, some 34 are underway with at least a few completed, the digital images are taking longer to emerge. In part this has been a consequence of the winter conditions that have made it more difficult to progress the shooting of the photographs from which each is derived. The past couple of days have seen improved weather conditions and in turn trips to the villages have yielded some results. However village life in Leicestershire is both quiet and uneventful and especially neat and tidy! Finding fresh visual interest in some places is tougher than one might imagine. The knack seems to be in the little details; the metallic sign wrapped around the post to protect it from the farm traffic; a row of footballs neatly lined up on the bench seat; the strange upright post in the playing field;the incompleted wiring jobs etc. From these come the disjointed and clumsily arranged collaged images that spark off the ways into the paintings.

How a picture comes together

Part of the point of this diary is to show to some extent how each picture comes together. As part of my intention is to endeavour to keep a singularity within each it is important that I recognise where tropes begin to coalesce. Sealing off certain motifs and techniques is vital to this process. Typically though the process of making each starts with the taking of a set of images in a certain location, these are then subjected to a collaging process within Photoshop - for me it is critical that this doesn't become too sophisticated - and a print is arrived at. This is then taken into the studio and a loose transcription is made onto one of the standard linen canvases. At each stage the variability of the transcription, surfaces, colours and even further alterations to the forms are happily incorporated into the methodology. Describing all this makes it seem random and haphazard and I suppose this is so. However I make the choices and decisions with my own internal dialogue that at the very least means that it is directed by some sort of narrative albeit maybe one that only I am interested in! I picked up a catalogue at the studio today that had a statement in it from the artist Michael Finn. Finn was Principal at Falmouth School Of Art when I was a student there. I admired him and latterly have admired his art. He wrote that "I am rather in the dark about what I do except that it feels right for me and seems to be within a tradition that is nearly a century old and yet it is still possible to make something very personal, which I think is wonderful". I rather feel that it is wonderful too.