For a couple of months, I have struggled in the studio. Drawings based on Gropius’ house in Dessau fill sketchbook pages. Images of the trees around the ‘masters houses’ of the Bauhaus, printed out, litter my worktable. My ‘bag’ is colour of course, and like most war time images the photographs I have taken in Dessau are mostly black and white even though taken in a modern digital camera for full colour. Only the trees provide the colour as I realise when I started on the first larger work, and very limited too. Disappointed, I prevaricate again…
A dream of suburbia in black and white
As usual my prevarication involved walking along the esplanade to the ‘pier’ at Splash Point. It was a grey day when colour is usually muted, and high tide when much of the rust and decay is hidden. Yet when I looked at the Eastbourne side metal work the colours reached out to me. “Enough”, I had said after BRotS #92 disappeared into store, but after months casting around, I have yet to find anything that turns me on in the same way. However, it is turning out to not be a return but a step forward, albeit one that, like the first of the BRotS images, has yet to mature into something I like.
The rusting metal of Seaford’s ‘pier’. A book of images is now in Seaford Museum
I produced just a couple of pieces from imagery of steps on the seafront and I didn’t like the result (see Mark Making), but it and a couple of pieces done just to research paint/pastel combinations now grace my ponderwall as I struggle to sort the whirl in my head, a whirl I confess that is compounded by considering where I am at 78 and whether I have anything left ‘in the tank’ to say. But I ain’t dead yet, so of course I must crack on – its not the crack of doom either. Maybe that is why the grey of the steps was initially attractive and why my heart pulled me back to colour. Who knows (only the Old Man in the Mountain)
The colour of decay
So, the walk ended making a kind of reaffirmation that the decay continues, even accelerates, rather like Starmer and co are accelerating the decline of Britain (unemployment announced today as a ‘shock’ rise), only in my case by arthritic hands not an arthritic brain, as in their case. The photographs have a familiarity to them, but the hiatus and experimentation is challenging what the outcomes may look like. A long-winded way of saying the work is changing, moving further still from representation although most would struggle to see any ‘representation’ in the BRotS despite my beginning by #92 to feel it was becoming a straitjacket.
Looking at the application of oil pastel on the textured acrylics, harking back to my colour squares
I am experimenting not just with how I apply the paint but also the marks I add with oil pastel exploiting the textures. I have a problem with materials and will struggle to replace the pastels I have been using as the Chinese maker appears to have disappeared from the marketplace and the pastels were the right size/price/colour range and hardness for me to work perfectly. Currently available pastels from French manufacturers are too soft (and expensive!) and I somehow missed the classes in how to make my own pastels years ago. Its all grist to the mill.
The first of the BRotS was a bolt, so #1 from 5 years ago
Underpainting is beginning to grow in importance too, although slowing down progress not helped by how cold the studio is in the mornings now we are creeping nearer to frosts and winter. I’m mentally a bit slow really, I should have realised long ago that process mattered more than the end result – maybe hangover from those first post-Hopper style exhibitions in the 1970’s in Brighton being so successful. But then it is always important to remember any act needs an audience, and work needs to be accessible without having words to carry it.
Still a bit damp n the studio wall – needs varnishing yet. Acrylic with oil pastel additions on 3x gesso primed cartridge 27 x 16.5 inches
Colour is emotion as philosopher Goethe identified and my use of colour is emotional and intuitive, growing out of my teen years in the duns grey and browns of Cypriot landscape and my reaction to green England with red buses. So how can I step further away from my visual source without losing myself in a logic maze that locks out the audience? A logic maze that may mean I lose what is left, wrinkled and grey, of me…
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