We Used To Think The Motorway Looked Like A River...

I’ve been using the camera on my phone a bit like a sketchbook lately. I love the spontaneity it offers and it’s ease of ability to capture something seen more by chance. I’m finding it a great way of generating ideas as I travel through the landscape.  It seems to take quite a good picture at night, but the imperfections of it and the weird lighting effects it seems to sometime capture interest me too. Here are some recent ones looking down on the M5, and of some factories passed and motorway service stations stopped at, the parked lorries catching my attention. 

 

  The title of this post is adapted from an album title, ‘We Used To Think The Freeway Looked Like A River’, by Richmond Fontaine, which seemed to fit that image. It’s a pretty good record, not great, but the lyrics are really interesting. I recently read ‘The Motel Life’ by Willy Vlautin, the band’s songwriter and lyricist. This was a terrific tale of two brothers trying to escape their shared past. The prose style was incredibly engaging: very spare yet packed with observation and detail. Just up my street, and often very sad and moving at times. I’d really recommend it. Not so the record…

 

Author/songwriter Willy Vlautin, 'The Motel Life' 

In recent months I’ve also loved reading ‘How I Killed Margaret Thatcher’ by Dudley born, Anthony Cartwright. This is his third book after ‘The Afterglow’ and ‘Heartland’ set in the Black Country, and I’ve enjoyed all three. This one tells its story through the eyes of a nine-year old boy, who, as the narrator, bears witness to the devastating policies of Thatcher in the 1980’s on his hometown of Dudley and the surrounding factories, and the impact this has on his own family. It’s a both sad and angry book, and made me feel both sad and angry too. Finishing the book and then stepping back out it made me reflect on the world around me as it is now and see how much has been lost in our communities and society thanks to that woman’s policies.  The current coalition government are doing a devastatingly good job of hammering the last nails in the coffin. 

  Anyway, on a last, and less bitter note, other records I have enjoyed in recent months, include London Grammar’s debut  ‘If You Wait’, from last year, which is a wonderful warm, late-night listen. It’s been a record to get lost to to in the studio.

'Not Much Good Painting' -The West Midlands Open 2014

 

'The Gaze', oil on canvas, 210 x 150cms, in The West Midlands Open 2014, Gas Hall, Birmingham

It’s been a few weeks now since it opened and from when I went to the Private View, but I’m pleased with how my large painting ‘The Gaze’ looks in the ‘West Midlands Open 2014’ exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s Gas Hall. It looks great against this green wall, and it’s so nice to see it with some space around it as it hangs on a wall on it’s own. In fact, it’s the biggest painting in the show, which is a bit of a surprise in some respects, but in others it’s not. There does seem a current vogue for more modestly scaled painting, which I also felt when I exhibited in the ‘Worcester Open’ last year. My painting in that show, although at only five feet across and so not terribly large, was the biggest painting there too. It seemed to sit very awkwardly in that particularly show, like how I often feel at parties, and I didn’t like how it looked. I’m much more pleased with this representation of my work in the Gas Hall. 

 

Digging that green wall....

I just wished some of the punters visiting the exhibition felt the same. The comments book, although full of many complimentary things to say about the show, also has it’s fair share of, often quite outrageously rude, condemnatory comments too. I don’t know, as it is with these things, it’s a mixed bag, but I thought a good mixture of things if you are willing to look a bit harder than the feeling I got from some of the said commentators. Oh well. Each to their own.  Apparently there is ‘not much good painting’ in the show. Well, I didn’t notice that. Instead, here are some rather good examples that caught my eye…

Paul Newman, 'The Fly', mixed media on canvas

 

Angela Maloney, 'Danny Boy', oil and acrylic on canvas

 

Celia De Serra, 'Isabella', pencil on paper

The show runs until February 2015. I think it's well worth a visit. 

Lest We Forget

 

CRW Nevinson, 'After a Push', 1918

There were a few activities organized by different departments across the college to mark today’s hundredth year anniversary of the beginning of World War 1.  I held a presentation of art created from the period by different artists from both Britain and Germany, as well as looking at more contemporary examples by artists in more recent conflicts.  Here are some of the examples of paintings I shared with my students and colleagues today to remember the terrible loss and sacrifice made by so many, and the key role art, from painting to poetry, has played in helping us attempt to understand the horrors of war and conflict.  

 

CRW Nevinson, 'Bursting Shell', 1915

 

Paul Nash, 'The Ypres Salient at Night', 1916

 

Otto Dix, 'Der Krieg', etching and aquatint, 1921

 

Otto Dix, 'Skat Players', oil and collage on board, 1920

The brilliant Otto Dix, like so many German artists, was never afraid to look at things head on. Here in this painting he mercilessly depicts the former generals and officers who sent so many innocent men to their deaths with their terribly mutilated bodies and crude artificial limbs and 'tin jaws', yet still looking smart in their uniforms, medals proudly worn. Sights of ex veterans like these were common on the streets of post war Germany.

 

Henry Tonks, 'Portraits of Injured Soldiers', pastel

Tonks, a former doctor before becoming an artist, was asked to detail the terrible facial injuries suffered by 15% of soldiers on the frontline to aid early practitioners of plastic surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons. 

 

Peter Howson, 'Bosnian Harvest', 1994

Howson, a former soldier himself, was commissioned by The Times and The Imperial War Museum to be the official War Artist in Bosnia in 1993. Gruesome scenes like these, where local women collect the mutilated limbs of dead civilians, sent Howson to the edge of a breakdown.

Lest we forget.

Tail Whips and Back Flips

 

i-Pad study, local ramp park

It’s half term and I find myself at some of the local ramp parks as my six year old gets rid of some of that energy he’s full of on his stunt scooter and bike again. We go most weekends for a few hours whilst his sister naps in the afternoons, but as he was quick to tell me as I reminded that he had a week off school, ‘Brilliant! That means we can go to the ramps every day!’ At six, he is the only one on the planet.

Anyway, I did this i-pad study there the other day getting colder by the minute. I spend a lot of time there, often with a book, and always with a sketchbook, and have begun to amass quite a few drawings. I have been mulling over whether to develop something further about these cast concrete landscapes. I’m tempted to see if there are any ramp parks illuminated in the evenings to make studies from, as this would appeal to me more with my interest in the nocturnal landscape, now that the evenings are drawing in. 

Painting in my WASPs studio space, Edinburgh 1998

It’s an idea I’ve been mulling over for years the more I think about it and remember: scenes of illuminated parks and football grounds etc. It first came to me when I was lecturing at Sunderland University in 1998. The Fine Art Painting office was five floors up and overlooked a local park. One evening as I was preparing to leave and catch the first of my trains back to my home in Edinburgh I noticed the park below eerily lit up with brilliant floodlights and a small crowd of young guys playing football. Obscuring the view however, was this wonderful screen of silhouetted trees and branches. The combination of black against the artificial light of the park seemed such a good image and really captured my imagination. I consequently made some drawings and over a few months made a rather dismal attempt at a large painting of it back in my Edinburgh studio. I remember it as being my first serious attempt at a landscape painting and trying to move my work somewhere new. It felt exciting with possibility.

 

Jock MacFadyen, 'Mare Street Snooker Hall', oil on canvas, 1996 (?)

 Jock MacFadyen, 'Cambridge Heath', oil, 2004

Half way through making it, I ventured across the city to the Talbot Rice Art Gallery to see a very large exhibition of new Jock MacFadyen paintings. As a student I had enjoyed MacFadyen’s paintings of working class life similar to my own background, peopled by caricatured but always realistic characters set in the urban wastelands, but hadn’t seen any of his paintings for several years now. I was therefore shocked to see these new paintings where the figures had largely disappeared and the artist had foregrounded the buildings and the gritty, blasted urban landscapes. Several of them were also of floodlit parks with gangs of youths playing football at night just like the scene I was attempting to paint just a mile away in Gorgie! I felt gutted and unbelieving (this is all true by the way! I take this stuff pretty seriously!) I walked round the exhibition somewhat dazed, and then under grey Scottish skies staggered down The Mound and through the early evening headlights of Princes Street back to the studio, feeling that I had been totally beaten to it.  I went back and enjoyed the show several times, and reluctantly tried to finish my own rather lame painting.  I didn’t attempt anything serious with landscape again for several years, instead finding a route out of the corner I had found myself in by focusing instead on my portrait work.

Jock MacFadyen, 'Limehouse Basin', oil, 1998(?)

Now, having developed more of a ‘vocabulary’ in landscape painting of my own, sixteen years later, I feel more ready to return to this sort of subject again. If anything I’ve learned is that so often the development of certain ideas is a long, slow, and often unexpected process. You have to be patient. Also, knowing me I also know that I probably still won’t do anything with this idea, as it’s just one of several ongoing things I’m thinking of…

(There are a couple of nice Jock paintings on this blog of scenes at night, but I sadly could not find any examples on the internet of those floodlit football matches I was fed up that he’d done. Sorry.)

(It’s strange to observe the old photograph of the landscape painting that I found out and scanned for this blog and notice how much it looks like one of my present day nocturnal landscapes. I’ve still got it rolled up somewhere. When I have my major retrospective at the Tate it will feature in the first room you enter, ‘Early Beginnings’…! Or maybe not..)

Kids and Painting

oil on canvas, 140 x 70cms, 2014

It’s been a long and tiring couple of months. I don’t think I have quite recovered physically or mentally from the school summer holidays and the looking after of my two children daily, especially my six year old boy, as I too am on holiday from my lecturing job at this time.  From seven in the morning to seven at night I would be continually on the go in parks, zoos, skate ramps, museums and of course at home in the garden, before eventually throwing them in bed, opening a beer and collapsing on the settee after another day’s action. Some children are great at amusing themselves, and my youngest seems happy to do so but not so my son who needs more support with this. And then back to work at college, which I’m glad to say I have slimmed down to three days this year, taking an extra day off to look after my daughter. We were straight into an Ofsted inspection at the start of term, which is always the most stressful time as you get used to new groups and crank up the engines for another year. Only thing is, as you can probably tell I think my engine has been running constantly without much of a break and is in need of a service.  Please don’t get me wrong though, I love the time with the kids and consider myself incredibly lucky to be able to have some good quality time with them.  We have all had lots of fun this summer, as well as the usual ups and downs of parenting. It’s just really tiring is all I’m saying…! I don’t think I’m unique to any other parent.

It has to be said though, that the crazy days out with the kids, has really helped me focus my energies in the studio, where I found myself most evenings, relishing the quiet time to myself.  In this time I’ve found myself working on three new paintings, working more piecemeal, on different parts of a particular painting each time. Admittedly, two of them were nearly completed in single sessions, but then subsequently slowly worked on, a process I have found very satisfying.

This first painting (top) seems to signal the beginning of a break with all the black that has dominated all my recent paintings, and was painted in a much more relaxed way over several weeks. It began with the pink sky over a red ground covering a previously failed painting, and went from there. Although I had a plan for it with a drawing, when I started adding the colour more unexpected things seemed to emerge with the artificial lighting in the scene (it is a transport depot, still at night, and the red rectangle is the back of a lorry cab) suggesting a mood to follow, and I enjoyed trying out different things with the paint application and the different brushes used.  It’s really rough in parts with some things pretty undefined, but having a ‘rightness’ in my mind that I didn’t want to interfere with. I like it.

 oil on canvas, 150 x 90cms, 2014

 This second painting is bigger at five feet tall and is a different version of a painting I attempted a few months ago and shared on the blog. I believe this is a much better realization of what I had in mind, after making some further drawings, which suggested simplifying things and adding more space to the top of the composition. 

 

pastel on paper, 25 x 17cms approx

As well as being a noticeably bolder with the purple motorway column! After an initial long session on this one, I was unsure how to resolve the difficult middle of the painting with the railings overlapping the lorry (yes, these are two lorry cabs again at the same transport depot). Eventually I was inspired to keep things more abstract after chancing across some images on the net of Ad Reinhart’s early abstract paintings, which contain lots of overlapping shapes and forms.  I think this abstraction creates a sense of dislocation in the image that I’m pleased with. My friend, artist Andrew Smith said that both paintings had a sci-fi feel too, with some of the details in the lamps and other forms, which I had also recognized, although this is accidental. It’s a happy accident though, as I’ve also been continuing to talk with artist Sian Stammers about developing the ‘By The Way’ project with a focus on the canals that link the West and East Midlands. In a proposal we have been working on, Sian discussed the idea of a return to the use of canals in a future ‘post-oil’ world, where motorways may lay desolate and empty. It planted a seed of thinking about these images of lorry cabs, of which I’ve now done three, where there is a sense of them being abandoned by the edge of these canals underneath the motorway, in a wider context or meaning such as this world envisaged by Sian.  Andy also thought I should work more on the railings in this one. I think he’s right. He usually is. 

 

'Shoulder To Shoulder', oil on canvas, 90 x 150cms, 2014

This final large painting has a slightly otherworldly quality too, but largely in the ‘reflected’ composition and the sense that the whole image is floating and mobile. It’s an image of a mountain-like collection of wooden palettes in a factory alongside the canal bank. I like the strangeness of the image, and the repetitive pattern made by the structure. I had imagined making something more expressive with this one, but it wasn’t where it wanted to seem to go, so it has ended up like this instead. I had thought it completed, but having since looked at the building-like structures in artist Viera De Silva’s paintings, I think I’m going to work on it further and try and be bolder with pushing the abstraction of the pattern. We'll see...

 

oil on canvas, 100 x 120cms, 2014

I’ve also been continually playing about with this painting too, which I’ve now flipped from a portrait to a landscape format and again, simplified things. This is the starkest, and certainly most abstract, thing I’ve done, and when I took it to this stage I didn’t think for a minute that it was finished. But since then I’ve been living with it around and I’m not so sure. I’m like it as it is just now, but things change. I certainly have no more ideas for it at the moment…As I reflect in this blog I can see how I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting of different kinds in the last few months, and with these recent paintings I feel like I’m beginning to push things on a bit more successfully and with a renewed sense of purpose. It’s hard though isn’t it? Creating stuff. 

 pastel on paper, 25 x 17cms approx

There seem to be a few key words to this blog: abstraction; simplification, experimentation, now that I’ve completed it, which reminds me of my how I talk to my students this last year in summing up our lessons, with an emphasis on promoting English in the classroom. It seems a bit sad really and a reminder how much I’ve had the Ofsted blues in the last year and the horrible pressures at work this has carried…Like so many in the profession, I really feel I’ve begun to lose my motivation and confidence with teaching lately.

This has been an uncharacteristically long blog, but it’s been a while…Kids and painting: that’s all I seem to do these days. Seems pretty good to me..

 

Indigo Octagon: 'The Compulsive Orgonists of West Bromwich'

 

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Today sees the launch of ‘The Compulsive Orgonists of West Bromwich’, the latest publication by Indigo Octagon, the small collective of artists I work which with comprises of myself, Andrew Smith, HR Smoke and Chris Cowdrill. This is our fourth publication now, with two of the others: ‘Stolen Car’ and ‘Black Highway’, accompanying two of my solo exhibitions, and the first one, ‘If A Picture Paints A Thousand Words Then Why Can’t I Paint?’, accompanying our first (and to date only) collective exhibition in 2012.  

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The general idea is that when we meet up we all bring different ideas, bits of work etc to the table and try and develop something from this. This new publication mainly belongs to Chris and Andrew and grew out of some great drawings Chris had been doing based on Victorian era beards and moustaches which seemed to fit well with some of Andrew’s recent writing and poetry, which includes ‘The Compulsive Orgonists…’ of the title, and some of his photographs. My own limited contribution was mainly working with Chris later on in developing the concept of it looking like an old book cover using one of Andrew’s photographs as inspiration.  

 

  Here is a link so you can view it online, and over the course of this week we are sharing some extracts from it on the Indigo Octagon Facebook page. We hope to sell it, alongside the other publications, at some Art Book or Fanzine fairs or stockist’s and are currently looking into opportunities for this. In the meantime, we are selling copies at just £3 each, and if anyone would like to buy one you can contact me through my website, or Indigo Octagon via the Facebook page.  There are only 30 copies, each one editioned, and each copy also comes with three great portrait cards featuring fantastically bearded gentlemen created by Chris. 

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Following on from this we are currently looking into venues and potential collaborators to organize ‘The Compulsive Orgonists of West Bromwich’ exhibition….

http://issuu.com/indigooctagon/docs/indigo_octagon4

https://www.facebook.com/IndigoOctagon?ref_type=bookmark

 

On a roll....'The Gaze' in The West Midlands Open 2014

 

'The Gaze', oil on canvas, 210 x 150cms, 2013

….And today I heard that one of my paintings has been selected for the West Midlands Open 2014, a biennial collaboration between Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and Wolverhampton Art Gallery, showcasing the best the region has to offer from practicing artists.  It has become a regular feature on the region’s cultural calendar since it’s first exhibition in 2006, and I’m lucky enough to have been selected twice, in 2006 and 2008. This year It was selected by Birmingham artist Barbara Walker and curator Zoe Lippett from New Art Gallery Walsall.

My painting ‘The Gaze’ was selected which I’m so pleased about for a couple of reasons. It’s great to be in this exhibition, which will be seen by so many visitors in a very prestigious venue, and on a more personal level it’s a nice validation to have one of my more recent pieces selected which have only been exhibited once at Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery in January in my exhibition ‘Black Highway’. I think some of these paintings are much more unusual and experimental and you never know how they might be received. This is how I felt about ‘The Gaze’ in January, but actually it turned out to be one of the most popular paintings in the show, which encouraged me to therefore put it forward for the West Midlands Open. 

Phew, I’m on a roll in these last few weeks….