A Marvelous Activity

 

'Livin' On The Edge Of The World', oil on canvas, 80 x 100cms, 2021

I sometimes think of doing other things, but actually it’s much more interesting to paint. It is just a marvellous activity that humans have invented…’

Frank Auerbach, 2015, who celebrated his 90^th birthday yesterday on the 29^th April. He probably celebrated by painting…

 

oil on canvas, 40 x 50cms, 2021

 I’ve made an awful lot of paintings since the beginning of the year. I’m normally fairly productive given the limits on my time I have in my role as a parent and lecturer, but these last few months have seen me continually painting, almost as if time is running out. Maybe it’s an age thing, maybe it’s the pandemic forcing me to be at home, where my studio is, more, maybe it’s both of these things. Sometimes it seems increasingly all I ever want to do and all I am capable of doing.

oil on canvas, 40 x 50cms, 2021

In the last two months I’ve made a return to looking at motorways and their surrounding landscape, making some paintings based on photographs I took at Spaghetti Junction, a place I’ve avoided in my paintings of motorways, largely because of the extremeness of the scale of its architecture and its notoriety. It seemed almost a cliché of a motorway, a futuristic highway from a J G Ballard novel, whose writing I have never actually read but have been encouraged to by others over the years. I found it all a bit off-putting as this is not where my interests were at the time. 

oil on canvas, 40 x 50cms, 2021

oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2021

Yet despite the vast scale of the architecture of Spaghetti Junction the paintings I have made so far have surprisingly ended up being on a small scale. I have made two larger paintings, but at 80 x 100cms, they are relatively modest. They have taken much longer to make, whereas working on the smaller paintings have enabled me to keep moving rather than working on one painting for longer. It has helped me to keep trying out more images and get more momentum going which is one of the reasons I’ve been able to do so much lately. There is also something about the size of the mark in relation to the image on the smaller scale that excites me as well as the paintings appearing more intimate in relation to their subject matter.    

'Zona', oil on canvas, 100 x 80cms, 2021

However, after making the 3 small ones shared here I made two more, slightly bigger ones, where I felt I was becoming a bit unstuck with my use of colour. They were just too, well, colourful and a bit sweet, as well as spatially very complex, so I have turned my attention to some different work for now which I’ll share in my next post.

Here’s a link to a nice interview with Frank Auerbach in the link below (he makes better colour choices than me):

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/16/frank-auerbach-when-paint-fantastic-time-lots-girls