The year is closing and I am sorry for not posting anything in November, but somehow that month went by with very little time for writing down what I was doing or thinking about.
One very important announcement that formulated during November and has been confirmed this month is that I have teamed up with four other artists and booked a London gallery for a week in October next year. The gallery is called the Espacio and is in Bethnal Green Road, just round the corner from Brick Lane. I will announce details nearer the time but suffice it to say it will show the work of five different artists’ take on contemporary landscape.
My work has had a remarkable turnabout inspired by my time away at the Newlyn School of Art. I have always tried to portray abstract thoughts and techniques in my paintings to date, but have never really started from a purely abstract idea. The representational method of describing a given scene has always been the starting point of any work I have created; abstract elements have then crept in as the work develops, and often the bold brushwork that I try to incorporate comes with the finishing marks.
An exercise done at Newlyn has been the key to understanding a different approach that can be used at the initiate a painting. The method was to describe a given view very quickly onto a drawn grid of squares with any appropriate materials. By quick I mean under 10 minutes in total, working from square to square until the grid ( or part of it is rendered ) with the minimum of detail. Taken as a whole the finished result is a fragmented visual of the observed scene with each square denoting a particular part of the whole.
The interesting part is now the analysis of each individual square, using it to visualise a complete painting that could come from it. The subsequent painting could be enlarged and rendered with a variety of mediums using whatever technique the small individual sketch suggests.
What I find so fascinating is that I am using a real record of a landscape scene but only revealing a small part of the recorded image and maximising the potential of the image from a minute part of a conventional rendering. This of course can be exploited using any of the squares; some will reveal extraordinary abstract arrangements and some will not, so you can pick and choose – there is so much material here!
This is all a big experiment for me at the moment so I am not adding to any of the gallery of paintings on this website at present, but I am going to change the whole look of the site in the New Year and I hope to have some of the best examples of this approach on it. So look out for a dramatic change of direction next year!!!
All right – just one painting to show what mightbe coming soon!!
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