Written musings on making art and the results. Life in the slow lane
The Brexit Daisy
It was a tough canvas for me. So much in it that was experimental, new, and controlling and creating progressions of colour across the surface much more difficult with differing techniques than I had previous anticipated. I played with how to mix colour without changing it. So, a kind of sub-pointillist approach of marks of different colour one on another was crudely implemented. I layered colour and cut into it with different implements. I tried dragging paint rather than brushing it.
Alt: Primary
Perhaps every artist is their own personal ‘Trump’ and they show their alternate realities in their painting, but because art is generally not seen as life threatening and often creates beauty this reality is objectively enjoyed by others. If you consume art you choose your own ‘Trump’ to follow, diving into their reality.
The difference between art and politics is art rarely kills or impoverishes, whereas politics often does both.
Getting Started
I draw up the canvas and start to paint, but best laid plans can fail in contact with reality. I try to set parameters of colour from the start on the canvas, and that tends to set the palette. In this case I have a range of earth colours, to be contrasted against a range of violet/purples. In turn these will work against a range of greens. Tones will create diagonals to compete with the weakened grid, contrasts will be stronger with more tonality. Well, that is the intention anyway
One Bound
The daisy appears delicate, its white petals gently fringed with pink and the Archimedean spiral of the yellow centre shouting its colour against the green of the lawn. But it is robust, refusing to disappear under the attention of the lawn mower, its white spots breaking the stripy green of the mown grass. I first made a painting of the lawn in 1968 whilst in college, and I still find mowing the garden one of the essential pleasures of life, both visually and through the wonderful scent of new cut grass.
Blast from the Past
Their generation made the opportunities for me, their votes changed the country for the better, making me the first in the family to have a University education, enabling an NHS to save my life several times over. They would be despairing of a political class that allows health and defence to crumble whilst engaging in spending billions on foreign aid in a form of national ‘virtue signalling’
Valley of the Shadow
I went in to have my biopsies take under general anaesthetic. “Ha” said the anaesthetist, “you’re the artist aren’t you, we’ve seen you before”. I said “that’s right – I’ve had four operations recently, I get a fifth free…” Mirth all around. I’m still laughing…
I am working on another in the ‘Andreas Daisies’ series. The first is now in Seattle (my 4th work sold into the USA), and this is a larger and more complex third daisy image. It is strangely jittery working, not because of anything to do with the image, but entirely to do with the tests and operations of the last four months.
Disintegrating Daisies
We all belong. When chaos and disorder threaten or, even, occur, then change results. Current events show how those oppressed by rules can use the orderly rule based process of the state to change the world. The demagoguery of politicians or individuals of conviction can still change the world unpredictably. This process I mirror in my paintings. In an orderly way, I use a rule based approach to create images of chaos that in turn take on their own order and beauty.
The Wrong Shoes, eh Gromit?
It stands erect, ringed in red and white. The dark wilderness of its base set aside from the billowing white up swelling of the chalk cliffs behind it. Thrusting upwards in public warning, its tip glazed and different to its shaft, it stands out by day attracting the attention of thousands who come to gaze down on its magnificence.
Aftershocks Continue
Once more I experience that feeling of dread, but not as intensely this time, just a frisson of fear. Now too I have a programme of work stretching ahead with both camera and the studio which will sustain me, distract me and give me a range of creative problems to worry about. Life is taking over again from fear of death and the Horseman has retreated.
How to become an Artist or Designer – a quick Guide for a young person
Many look at the glamorised television shows and think ‘I can do that’. Like being a footballer, anyone can kick the ball, but the level of skill needed to rise to the top is considerable and beyond the capabilities of many people.
Picking Daisies
how the decision making with the lower daisies challenges just as much as those at the beginning. The balance of dislocation of the image colour against the line drawing, edge versus surface, constantly hovers on the brink of disintegrating into chaos – which is ,of course, largely what I want. If the viewer feels uneasy, challenged, discomfited by assumption versus reality of the image, that too is a desired result. The double take.
Collecting Artist Prints
In art college, I began looking at collecting the work of other artists, starting with work by friends like Geoff Turpin. This expanded into trying to buy the work of established ’names’, underpinned by the feeling that the only way I could hang my work on the same wall as, say, Patrick Caulfield, was to buy a work of his to hang alongside mine at home.
Art Student to Artist
“the shock of the outside world will have been a douche of cold water, as it was for me when I sobered up. Surviving this shower to establish a practice and a studio is sometimes impossible, and the shower can become a bleak torrent when competing against finding employment, marriage etc.. “
Aftershocks
Making art is a performance, and like any performance it seeks an audience. Performing on canvas can be just a terrifying as walking on stage – rather more detached from the audience reaction, but I have experienced those newspaper reviews that disparage the artist with an incomprehension on the part of the critic about the work, as well as those reviews that delight in it (one said recently “made my heart sing”).
An African Gem: Bushmans Kloof
I have been to many places had many adventures, few compare to the delights of Bushmans Kloof. Asked to sum up my visits by a friend, I said “Simple, this is a little piece of heaven come to earth”.
Traumatized
No memory, or at least only a vague memory, of coming around after the operation, which lasted well over 4 hours. “Are you alright” he asks anxiously, as I had apparently complained of chest pains in recovery. Probably due to the tight strap they had wrapped around me during the operation. He says the removal of kidney and ureter had been a success but unfortunately an artery was removed “in error”.
What do you paint?
Classic question, isn’t it? Everyone’s response when you say you paint, occasionally bitten off halfway through when the questioner realises the foolishness of asking. “I do flower paintings” is my standard riposte to this question. An answer as misleading as the question is unanswerable verbally. How to describe in succinct words my use of colour and imagery when, as the editor of the London ‘Times’ Newspaper now says, one picture is worth two thousand words?
Shock to the System
Three days in, half a dozen works have been sold from the exhibition. Three days in which I have been shocked by the state of management in the hospital – observed over a weekend and showing that, certainly as far as this hospital is concerned there is an awful lot wrong with management of cleaning, care and treatment.
Art Flowering
Drawings and paintings of Poppies, geraniums, windflowers explore colour and space. Interlocked with the grid of experience they shift and move creating jewel like experience of colour illusions, paralleled by allusions to distortions and disruption social structures inflict on innocent lives.
Autumn Lives
Autumn. The heating goes on again. Sunrise is after breakfast. The first gales blow more and more leaves off the trees. Rain starts to be more frequent, harder, sometimes horizontal. Long coats appear, the barber talks of wearing his Barbour when he walks his dog
The Dustman and the Baroness
The studio occupies a corner at the bottom of the garden. Despite the interruptions that come from the last two years of medical interventions I am once again in a most productive painting place. I am working through many issues addressed 40 years ago, facing similar questions and finding similar answers. At this rate I will soon pass the place I was at in my creative thinking in 1980, and then onwards to find new solution to address new problems. Painting is exciting and rewarding.
Another day, another poppy
I use acrylic, and my palettes are old plates. I have discovered that acrylic paint will stay wet on the plate for days if it is covered – except for the colour you need, mixed and used yesterday, which of course dries out and can only be mixed again with great difficulty…
Remembering the Poppy
Only when I am in the studio can I enter a state of mental isolation from my worldly problems. Total mindfulness, a state of mind many use drugs to achieve, but which painting can ‘turn on’ for me. When I’m painting or working on drawings the world ceases to exist, I even forget my health issues.
A Second Growth of Honeysuckle
As I work towards the latest exhibition there continue to be differing strands through the work. This latest painting follows the path of the grid paintings, but my mind is now turning to large scale drawings again, as I did for the Sunlit Wave series (also to be in the Seaford October 2016 show) and which will now be pursued through the drawings that are to come from the ‘Bridget Riley of the Shingle’ series that I will be working on later today.