'On The Corner', oil on canvas, 60 x 60cms, 2022
I have just taken down another exhibition at Malvern Library, ‘Night Walks’, which opened at the beginning of April and ran until the end of May. I really enjoyed exhibiting there this time last year, so I asked if I could show again with a more specifically themed exhibition based on a selection of the paintings I have made of the nocturnal landscape over the last 10 years.
Typically, most of the paintings I exhibited were pretty recent, as I’m always more interested in showing the new stuff, but there were some older ones I had made that I have not had the opportunity to exhibit previously. It looked pretty good, and I had some very positive feedback from friends and visitors, and I had a very nice and well-attended Private View on a Saturday afternoon.
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| Small studies and sketchbooks |
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‘Night Walks’ notes
I was privileged to have a review written of this exhibition by artist/writer Juliet Mootz where my paintings were compared to those by Edward Hopper. This is not for the first time. And yet, although like many of us, I am familiar with Hopper’s work, he has never really been an artist whose work I have paid much attention to compared to others on my long, personal artistic journey. I can appreciate his work, but that is different. However, I had seen a retrospective of his work at Tate Modern in 2004 and seeing all the work brought together like this had really left me cold. It was only when I read the words of Luc Tuymans, the contemporary Belgian Painter, who was also enjoying his own retrospective in the adjacent gallery at Tate, describing his own enjoyment of Hopper’s paintings because, he says, ‘his figures look more like puppets than real people’, that I saw them differently and looked at them in a fresh way It had been Hopper’s figures that had troubled me most but seeing them described like this made me consider Hopper’s world differently.
'The Lighted Window', oil on canvas, 70 x 80cms, 2022
By chance, a few days after the opening of ‘Night Walks’ exhibition I purchased a slim catalogue for £1 on Hopper’s work in a second-hand bookshop. I liked the look of the book, but the essays inside revealed that unexpectedly there are many qualities and interests that I do share with Hopper, both with the artist and in the art.
Much has been read into his works, especially concerning American loneliness and alienation in urban settings, yet he presented himself as an artificer, interested in technical problems; how to reconcile three sources of light in a picture; how to find forms for such uncentred subjects as highways and railroads. He was, and is, generally classified as a realist of sorts, yet he himself thought that ‘the realism thing’ had been overdone. He wrote, in the 30’s, of major painting as a record of the artist’s emotions, yet he is often judged to be a completely impersonal painter- a camera-eye, quite uninvolved with his subjects. I recognise how many of these often-contradictory characteristics exist in many of my own paintings, particularly the ‘Night Walks’, but also less visibly, in the ideas behind them, so these seemed a good point of entry to this talk tonight about the work on display.
'The Bus Stop', oil on canvas, 100 x 120cms, 2022
Realism and the Problems of Depiction:
The paintings throughout the exhibition are all based on first-hand observations of my local landscape in the first instance, often based on photographs taken on my smartphone, not arbitrarily, I’m always looking and trying to remain open to seeing something that visually excites me, but not necessarily with any pre-mediated idea behind them. Sometimes however, I do go to more unusual, off the beaten track locations that interest me- beneath motorways, post-industrial sites, canals, and fields- to explore them and see what I may find that I could use. Often, these are places I knew well growing up in the Black Country that have changed a great deal due to post-industrialisation. Again, I just try to remain open to finding something, rather than having anything more specific in mind. I think these stages of gathering and seeking material rooted in the real world to work with are the aspects of realism that belong to my work, after that those things are left behind and the problems of painting begin.
'Arctic Landscape II', oil on canvas, 120 x 90cms, 2018
The problems are rooted in the fact that as a painter, I don’t really want to create paintings that merely exist as painted illusions of the subject matter, I want the subject matter to be the raw ingredients in my attempts to create interesting paintings that exist as objects with their own reality and existence, and dealing with the inherent problems in that area between describing a subject with some level of emotion and meaning and also the act, and language, of painting itself, how to fill a space in an interesting way, issues that have preoccupied painters stretching right back to Giotto and Duccio. For me, these include the physical act itself of painting- a primary concern- to exploring the rich and varied language of painting- mark-making, how paint is applied, colour, form, shape, edge, space etc, scale and composition. Much of my own route into this has been by following the path cut through the weeds and nettles by certain representational painters from the latter half of the twentieth century, particularly American artists such as Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, Lois Dodd, Jane Frielicher, Wayne Thiebaud, Alice Neal alongside other contemporary examples others who inspire me such as Peter Doig, Hurvin Anderson, Mathew Khrishnu and Matt Bollinger, Wilhelm Sasnal. From these examples I have strived to develop a personal painterly language that leans heavily on the lessons of abstract painting than traditional representational painting, but also draws on older art historical examples too.
My painting’s compositions are very carefully thought out beforehand. I like the idea of executing the paintings in a very direct way, so that they take on the appearance of having arrived fully formed, without great struggle or being over-wrought, with everything in its right place, concise and tense. A bit like a Raymond Carver short story. The struggle goes on beforehand.
Most of the paintings are completed in one session, almost like a performance that lasts for a few hours, and is a record of that, but this is not attempted without the necessary rehearsals that go with it- drawings, smaller oil studies, sketchbook work- to make that possible. This performative aspect is inspired in part by Chinese brush painting.
Of course, this can have its drawbacks- if under-rehearsed, or I choose to make something more spontaneous, which the smaller paintings often are, the paintings can fail in that first instance, and are either scrapped, or if the will is there, further, much slower, work carries on, with different approaches explored to make the painting work. This can be seen in the paintings ‘Lost In The Supermarket’, and ‘Late Night Shift’ in this exhibition in particular.
'Lost In The Supermarket', oil on canvas, 60 x 50cms, 2023
Many of the paintings are also painted over older, failed paintings, which can bring different and unexpected surface qualities into play, and fragments of the older painting can sometimes remain and be incorporated into the new painting. There is a loss that takes place, as the paintings that are painted over have often had the same amount of time and effort spent on them, but they just haven’t worked, so you must make the always difficult decision to let them go, destroy them, paint over, redact, fail over. It’s a sense of loss that painters must deal with. Which brings me to the next section….
'Ice Cream Wars', oil on canvas, 120 x 150cms, 2022
Bridging the 3 Point Question: The Personal, Political and the Art Historical
How can you get emotion into a painting? What a strange question, perhaps- there are many technical and formal ways to convey an emotional feeling in the work after all- colour, subject, composition, but that something else that is hard to pin down is more elusive. This question is one that arises for me out of three separate conversations rooted in observations made by 2 different visitors to the private view of ‘Night Walks’, who in relation to the painting ‘Silence’, which depicts a somewhat ominous view beneath a motorway, they felt in conversation that it was a painting that held a lot of emotion.
'Silence', oil on canvas, 100 x 120cms, 2010
The other conversation was with my artist friend, Andrew, on his first visit to my studio at the beginning of our friendship, over 10 years ago when he saw this painting, not long after I had just made it. Andrew immediately probed at the ‘psychology’ behind the painting, which I tried to brush away, stating that I was motivated only in the formal decisions behind the image, and not interested in any psychological readings. This is true, I had been trying to keep these things at bay for years for various reasons and self-imposed rules I had been using in my work, one of them being ‘no narrative’. Andy persisted with the argument that yes, that might indeed be true, but just because the painting was not created in those terms, it doesn’t mean that the painting does not possess a psychology behind it that you may or may not be aware of. I was very confused and excited by Andy’s observations that night, and it had a significant impact on the course of my painting and how I thought about it going forward and how I began to develop my work in landscape painting.
Unknown to Andy, the painting was created not long after I had lost my younger brother, Stuart to cancer. He was 36 and it had been a traumatic time before and after his death. During the period of his illness, I would visit him and witness his rapidly deteriorating health- one felt helpless, and it was like trying to chase a snowball down a hill that just gets bigger and bigger, but you are unable to reach it and stop it. I would come home from visiting him, and unable and unwilling to talk about how he was to my wife I would just go to my studio and paint, often large canvasses, as a means of trying to process my thoughts and feelings. No great paintings came out of this, but the process was helpful, despite often have mixed feelings about the idea art of ‘art as therapy’ (it’s just too hard to be therapeutic!), but I know really that art does have great therapeutic powers.
The night I got the call that had he died from his wife, I visited him one last time to say goodbye. He had died peacefully at home, and he lived on the estate not very far away from where this motorway was located, an estate also near to our childhood home, and this area of landscape beneath the motorway, ‘The Lanes’, was a place I had walked beneath many times growing up. On this final visit to him, I remember vividly the drive to his house that took me beneath this motorway again, and the deafening silence in my head and the numbness I felt trying to take it all in. The silence is where the title of the painting comes from.
It was only a few months later, when I was working on this painting and 5 others that accompanied it as a series- my first ‘serious’ landscape paintings, that I realized that I was perhaps making some sort of record of that experience of that final visit to my brother and processing my grief and loss in a more tangible way than the paintings I had made during his illness. I feel some of this is held in this painting, and was maybe seen by Andy, and the recent visitors to this exhibition, but it is hard for me to see how it is visible too- it is not an expressive painting, I painted it in a very planned and impersonal way, and it is an attempt to be in dialogue with certain aspects of American abstract painting such as those by Franz Kline and Ad Reinhart, and these memories that now appear infused within the work are personal only to me- but it seems to be and that is a mysterious thing.
It takes me back to Hopper and the idea in his work that is pinned on it about American loneliness and alienation in urban settings, where he stated that he was more interested in the problems of depicting subjects from three different light sources etc, technical problems. Sometimes our real intentions are hidden from us, but perhaps more visible to others. These experiences have informed my thinking a great deal about the importance of painting what you know and looking to ‘your own backyard’.
There is a powerful, personal story behind that painting, and I have over the years, from this experience, begun to develop more of an interest in returning to some narrative aspects, without hopefully sacrificing my interest in the formal concerns and ideas when starting a painting that still preoccupy me and interest me most.
'4am', oil on canvas, 60 x 60cms, 2022
The political
The political dimensions that occupy much of my work, and that I think have a central place in it, are my interest in these edges of towns and cities, the so-called edgelands, that form the subject matter for many of my landscapes, in particular the post-industrial Black Country, but also certain quiet signs and signifiers found in our suburban streets- the abandoned furniture on the kerb; the skip signs of the fragility and impermanence of much existence for so many people; the ever present transit van delivering our latest Amazon parcel driven by the worker on zero-hour contracts; the queues of parked postal vans of workers on strike declaring ‘enough is enough’ after years of degradation in pay and their working conditions, the burnt out ice cream van a symbol of community strife and fear. There is a palpable tension and unease on the streets in this post-Brexit, austerity driven society of the UK that is ever harder to escape from if you live in the city, or its edges.
'Permanent Red', oil on canvas, 45 x 60cms, 2023
The Black Country, and the Midlands, is also an area that, despite its rich history and influence, is a place that exists neither between city or countryside, is often overlooked or hidden or skirted around by motorways and trains that cut through to culturally cooler places such as London or the North West cities of Manchester or Liverpool etc. Much of it’s history now buried beneath the post-industrial landscape of the ‘Geography of Nowhere’ of the out of town retail parks, the giant transit hubs of lorries transporting goods in and out of the region. I’m interested in these ideas and pay attention to them everyday, but I do not wish to be stridently political in any way, just quietly so. I hope that the paintings are much more ambiguous and subtle in their meanings, with the space between the viewer and the artwork being open for the audience to bring their own reading and experiences to them.
'The Skip', oil on canvas, 40 x 45cms, 2018
I would like to bring this stage of the talk to reflect how important the idea of the 3 point question: the personal, political and the art historical has been in the development of my painting, and the paintings I think work best are where I think this balance is held more equally. If I was to give any painter interested in observational work any advice, and I frequently do as a teacher, it is to encourage them to use their own story to develop their work. It will give it a more authentic, and original, footing, which is very important, but often can transcend this to say something of our shared experiences and relationship with the world around us. Thank you.
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