It started, as so many ideas do these days, with seeing something again in the garden. The fuchsia had grown tall against the flint wall. It was not just the progression of the scale of the floret, from tiny bud to full flower but also the progressions of colour and leaf size that accompanied that change.
Plants grow to the light so amid the photographs was one where I had looked up the plant into the sun. I started to develop the drawings around that image, and it led to the first of what I anticipate will be several canvases exploring looking up into the light. At a time when Britons seem oppressed by politicians grubbing around in the muck of bribes and sectarianism looking for the light seem an appropriate path to be going down. This appropriate especially after exploring the death of poppies and how their seed carries the golden hope of new life. It follows the long exploration of death and decay in the BRotS series.
My desk in the Studio
Now three or four images in, I am experimenting with a lesson grappled with at art college many, many, years ago in refining the relationship between colour tonality and hue. Conversations on my Facebook page looked at cameras inability to record simultaneous contrast, or rather perhaps the impossibility of the processing through digital media so that screen tonality produced the same effect as the rods and cones in the eye, an electronic simulacrum of the biological (visual pornography?).
One of my working processes is to use strips of canvases left over from stretching, usually four or five inches wide by 40 inches long, to test out colour and textural relationships. Now I need to do a variation of Corsham’s colour trials seeking to use paint to create light (and that, dear reader is called nailing your colours to the mast…)
In parallel I am tackling something I have become a little lazy about, which is refining the drawing, the ‘bone structure’ of the painting. In part this is because I am beginning to think the canvas may need to go big. Big canvases can be great as Monet proved, allowing you to walk into, be contained by, the colour experience the artist creates. They will burn well on my Viking funeral pyre when I pass on….
All the while I try to balance the studio with ageing enjoyment of walking (for health too), sometime with a friend generating picture stories I head up as ‘Two Men and a Dog’ whilst my missus engages with local politics. But all is a whole in that I walk with the camera and collect imagery – some purely for my own entertainment, some recording the colour I see on my walks. Art is everywhere, not just in galleries, and part of the job of any artist is to make you see what they see.
Where does this imagery feed into the studio if not directly into the work? Well the constant looking keeps my eye sharp and also reveals natural relationships between colour and tonality, a tonality that can change as a shadow moves with the suns’ rotation, or the shadow of a leaf fractional changes things before the shutter closes in the camera.
BRotS
As I look at tonality and hue, I start to play with the values in the photographs – the variety of colours to contrast one against another draw me back to the decaying sea front architecture, the BRotS where the light and tonality change as nature changes, the sun on rusting metal turning dull browns into strong oranges, adding vibrancy to the green of algae on the concrete. All feeds into my mental library, my internal computer (larger than the cat’s 2-megabit brain) and makes the painting of the strips of canvas, the explorations of colour and texture become not the workings of habit but new subtle explorations.
I go down to the studio with my vision fractionally altered by a morning walk. Seaford’s clear air clarifies and intensifies colour, especially at sunrise. It’s part of an evolution as an artist and the challenge to keep disciplined whilst I try to sort the colour relationships in the top of the fuchsia works, the tonal gradation through the height of the picture, making the vision clearly about looking into the light
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