The Far Field

oil on canvas, 60 x 80cms, 2020

I spent some time in the late afternoon cleaning up all my brushes after what has been an intense few weeks continuing to work on these paintings based on nearby fields between the town and the motorway. I’ve now made thirteen, of various sizes, with some more larger recent ones.  I see them very much as works in progress as each one I make often has me going back to a previous painting to re-think and re-paint different areas. 

oil on canvas, 120 x 164cms, 2020

I’m enjoying making them but I realised last night as I finished the latest one (above), exhausted, that I feel like I’m creating them with a lot of nervous energy- I mean it seems a bit crazy to have made thirteen in about four weeks- and I seem even more driven than usual. There is also something rather unexpected and a bit unsettling about them that seems to have emerged and that is when I look at the pylons in the paintings I just feel that I am looking at myself and I’m not sure what that’s all about. 

oil on canvas, 75 x 50cms, 2020

I was watching a video lecture by painter Wolf Kahn the other day, who has been a bit of an influence on my approach to painting the trees and hedgerows, where he stated as a painter that 'to know what you are doing is wrong. It's much better to not know what you are doing'. I have to agree and it was a point of view that really chimed with me the other day and a reminder of certain values that come in and out of focus.

oil on canvas, 80 x 100cms, 2020

Kahn was influenced by his teachings by Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffman and this movement’s interest in working from the subconscious mind. Although I have spent years working to avoid psychological readings of my work, when it comes to my landscape work I think there’s no running away from it. 

The Nights Draw In...

Recent Painting, oil on canvas, 2019

The nights have drawn in. I find this time of year, with the dark and cold and the uphill grind towards the end of a long teaching term, my least favourite. It feels like my body is often closed in on itself as I leave for work on dank, chilly mornings, ride the bus with a podcast for company (usually the brilliant Adam Buxton Podcast), creep into work, teach and mark student work all day, creep back out to the bus stop in the dark, get home to the family who are all as tired as each other before finally having some time to myself when I get the kids to bed about 9pm. And then….I head to the studio if I can on 2 or 3 nights, work till about 11pm- I seem to have a renewed energy while working, but am knackered after, then I collapse into bed and rise again the next morning to repeat it all over again. It’s not like this at other times in the year but these weeks from mid-November till Xmas always feel a bit like this. I love to get to January....

Recent Painting, oil on canvas, 2019

I have not managed to work on any larger paintings, but I have done a few smaller and mid-size paintings which I’m pleased with which have proven to be a bit more diverse. From ketchup bottles on a burger bar counter to recycling bins outside the local supermarket I’ve tried to source suitable subjects as a vehicle for getting more colour in the paintings and just to keep stretching what I do.

Recent Painting, oil on canvas, 2019

Recent Painting, oil on canvas, 2019

I also did this painting (at top of the post) of a lorry on this long, wide canvas that I had bought thinking it would be good if I could develop something for this unusual format. I had a few weeks previously taken some interesting photos of some huge lorries refuelling at a service station on a rainy night travelling back from London by coach with students. I made the painting late one night ten days after 39 bodies of migrants being trafficked from Vietnam were found in the back of a similar refridgerated lorry in Essex. This story seemed to give the image of this vehicle pulled up in the dead of night outside some bland non-descript building a different sort of resonance and feeling held in the oil on canvas…