oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2021
My
experience on Sky Arts Landscape Artist Of The Year and the practice work I
made before competing has lead me to experiment quite extensively with painting
on different toned grounds, including yellows, pinks, violets, blues and also
black for several months now. For years I have always painted directly onto a
white, primed surface liking the luminous quality this brings to the colour.
oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2021
Painting
on these toned grounds, however has been really interesting, particularly the
black grounds which seemed to create an unsettling atmospheric quality I
recently explored in greater depth over a series of more than 10 paintings. I used
a more reduced colour palette with these paintings too as a reaction to the
Spaghetti Junction paintings I’d been making where I thought I was getting a
bit silly with the colour.
oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2021
The
paintings in this series started out being based on some of the reference
photographs I made many years ago with my photographer friend Laura’s help of
the landscape beneath a small stretch of the M5 just outside West Bromwich.
These photographs were then used to inform my first motorway paintings and a
more serious foray into landscape painting.
oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2021
When
I made those original paintings I realised on completion that they were in some
way an expression of my grief at the death of my younger brother, Stu who lived
near to this place, a place where I was also born and knew very well growing
up. It was also the place I travelled through on my last visit to see him on
the night that he finally died of cancer aged just 36. Unsurprisingly, it’s a
night that is forever deeply etched in my memory. So I felt some trepidation in revisiting these
photographs, but there still seemed rich material in them that might lend
themselves to working on these black grounds….
oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2021
I
made 5 paintings before I felt I had used all I could from these old
photographs and it would also be better to go back now, 11 years later, and see
the landscape with fresh eyes and take some new photographs to work from.
oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2021
So,
again with Laura, who also taught me how to use my new digital camera to take my
own night time photographs, we went back and got some great new material,
including some images of the flats just beyond the motorway which seemed very
evocative.
oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2021
I
then completed with renewed energy another five paintings before deciding that
was enough for now.
oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2021
oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2021
I
did find myself transported back to that evening and completing the work felt
intense and urgent, so I wanted to stop. I see the paintings not as individual
pieces but as one, detailing a final journey for both of us that night….
oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2021
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