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...