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.