Juggling the studio as an addition to writing and photographing hotels for HotelDesigns, and at the same time making space for walks/fitness along the coast is proving a tough but enjoyable challenge. It means when I do get in the studio I tend to be very focussed as a lot of thinking goes on elsewhere. It can also mean the interaction of doing with the myth making process becomes a stuttering business rather than a free creative flow.
I also find myself slipping back into doubt and looking again at what I was doing in the 1970’s – very successful selling paintings that in my own mind I label ‘Homage to Hopper’. So cautiously I am exploring that are again. One of my most successful (to me at any rate) painting was done using a similar approach to the one I am nervously dipping into again now. ‘Tea4Two’ was done by collage of two paintings and translating the result onto a meaningfully sized (i.e. one that related a human scale) canvas.
Acrylic on canvas, 3’6″ square (now in a private collection in London)
I’m working from photographs, and wanted to go take another look at the shadows. I want to do a couple of ‘Hopperish’ images and work them into a collage prior to creating a painting using the traditional ‘squaring up’ process, and working the process into the end result – a painting about painting if you like.
Preparatory drawing of the five barred gate. Next step working out the relationship to the edge, having decided that including the white cliffs was not right yet
Taking another look was partly an excuse for another cliff top walk, partly another exercise in prevarication (displacement activity I think it’s called). Missed the timing for the shadows, which of course just gives me an excuse for taking camera and sketch book out another time. But I was dismayed to see the extent of the damage the recent rain and storms have done and how the whole cliff seems to be moving.
Shadows and colour quite different from the picture I took a couple of months ago
The fence on the side of the gate had started to come apart. It is not on the cliff edge being perhaps just under a hundred metres back, but there had been enough ground movement for the rails to pull out of the posts and to now be several inches short of slotting back together. A little further on there was more direct evidence of the cliff collapse as the railings that supposedly stop people walking too close to the edge had turned themselves into an invitation to disaster if anyone leans on them.
Hope nobody tries to lean on this fence
I hope that when the fine weather returns I will be able to come and maybe try direct working with watercolour and coloured pencils. I hope by the time (if) we get the fine sunny summer weather, the gate and the cliff walk will still be there…