Groundhog Day

 (I’m having really difficulty completing a second part blog post to my experience of Landscape Artist Of the Year so I thought, in the preferred spirit of looking forward not back, I would prefer to write briefly about some of the work I have made since the start of the New Year….)

'Winter Walk', oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2021

Having completed a large painting at the end of the 2020 in the series of pylons in fields I wanted to draw a line under this work at this point. I was feeling a bit exhausted with the theme for now, but had no particular plans for anything new.

When the New Year started and we soon sadly entered Lockdown 3 and I found myself working from home again, remote teaching, I ordered 10 small canvasses (50 x 60cms) with plans to experiment with  trying to create some new paintings based on some photographs I had been taking with a new DSLR camera I had for Christmas (a fab present!) on my familiar lockdown walks. I was interested in trying to capture something of the feel of the winter from photographs in which I have been trying to teach myself how to use the camera  and try to understand how to manipulate exposure using only the manual setting to explore mood and atmosphere through light and colour.

'Winter Walk', oil on canvas, 60 x 50cms, 2021

'Winter Walk', oil on canvas, 50 x60cms, 2021

I am really enjoying using the camera, but the paintings I created through January where I used some of these photographs as a starting point, particularly with the colour and light, were less successful and I found myself constantly re-
painting most of them to seek something that spoke more to me about these walks. The most pared down ones are the ones I’m eventually happiest with and will keep, but I’ve been struggling with painting the woods and fields, although I find them very beautiful to look at. I’ve found it hard to ‘key’ in to ways of painting the scenes that I’m happy with. As I worked on them I thought the motif of the path, which I continually find myself on day after day, was a good metaphor for the lockdown situation and it’s groundhog day feeling.

'Winter Walk', oil on canvas, 60 x 50cms, 2021

One afternoon, after some of the heavy snow we had fall in the area, I went out with the camera to try and take some photographs as the light faded from day to evening. I took some good photographs in the local edgeland woods, but as I came back onto my estate some of the parked up cars, covered in snow, and the snowy paths and roads caught my interest and I took a few photographs of these and printed some of these photos off. On a bit of a whim last week I created a small painting from one of them, rich in violets and blues from the snow in the twilight and ‘Bingo!’ I felt very excited and something creatively seem to open up, much more interesting than the landscapes I had been slogging over, and with much more potential. 

oil on canvas, 30 x 45cms, 2021

oil on canvas, 45 x 30cms, 2021

oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2021

oil on canvas, 60 x 50cms, 2021

Over the next few days I created five more paintings of these scenes. They seem very evocative and moody, and also capture something of the lockdown with their sense of expectancy. Most importantly they feel much more me and more distinctive. I feel back on the road once more…

oil on canvas, 50 x 75cms, 2021

Sky Arts Landscape Artist Of The Year 2021- Part 1 (Before...)

'Empty Streets', oil on canvas, 50 x 40cms, 2020

My selected entry to Landscape Artist Of The Year 2021

 Happy New Year. I can finally tell you about my participation last August as a contestant in Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year 2021, which started a new series this week on Wednesday the 13th January at 8pm. Up until now, as a condition of taking part, you are understandably not allowed to share anything about the programme on any social media platforms in case you spoil the result. I’ve been given the nod to share stuff about it now, but still can’t obviously share the result or my artwork from the day, but I thought it might be interesting to write about my ‘before and after’ experience. With this in mind this is the first of two posts- the ‘before’. A few friends know about my participation, but only a small handful know how I actually got on. 

For those that don’t know about the competition and have not seen it, it follows a similar format to it’s sister programme ‘Portrait Artist of the Year’ which has just finished it’s current run. Both series are presented by Dame Joan Bakewell and actor Stephen Mangan. Each weekly heat features six professional or amateur artists selected to compete from the thousands that apply by sending in a landscape painting (or drawing or print) and a short statement about their piece, the most interesting of which are then selected by the show’s judges and you are invited to take part. The show’s judges are highly respected and experienced curator’s Kathleen Soriano and Kate Bryan (look them up- what amazing CV’s!) and the rather brilliant painter Tai Shan Schierenberg. The artists then have to turn up at a given location (the specifics of which I was only told a few days before to avoid any cheating or practising beforehand) to set up in a ‘pod’- a small stage with easel, table, even materials if you need them, and a much needed roof-for each artist and in just four hours complete a ‘plein air’ artwork from a 180 degree view of the landscape in front of them. Working nearby are also 50 ‘Wild Card’ artists also invited along from the entrants but who didn’t quite make the competing six, one of whom from the six heats is invited to compete in the semi-final. At the end of the four hours the finished artworks are judged, a top three selected, and then from this an overall winner who progresses to the semi-final. So it was strange having spent much of the first few months of lockdown really enjoying watching both recent series away from the horrors outside in the Covid world, to be contacted by the show to be told the judges loved my own entry for this year’s competition and can I take part?!  Strange, but also incredibly exciting and gratifying. It felt like a real achievement to just get selected. For once, I felt quite proud, a feeling I never carry very easily.

'En Plein Air'

The painting that had been selected was, I think, a very unusual one, ‘Empty Streets’, and features at the top of this post. It is a painting of a bus stop near my Birmingham home based on a photograph taken on my phone on the way home the day I was sent home from work, as a college lecturer, last March and all schools and colleges were ordered to close as the pandemic took hold. It was an anxious and worrying moment in time, and the empty illuminated digital hoarding screen on the bus stop attracted me as it appeared like some sort of portal, gateway or door to a parallel reality to the familiar world I knew. If only I knew now ten months later. I painted the painting that night and always felt there was something about it that was hard to pin down but I thought was good. I eventually sent it to the competition thinking this a couple of months later, but also wrote about its relation to the pandemic in my statement. I wonder if this also caught the judges eye, because after all I think a landscape painting should have the power to conjure up or reflect the circumstances in which it was made. 

Working on location....

After the initial excitement I thought I’d better do some serious training for the competition, because as much as see myself as a landscape painter I don’t create my paintings ‘plein air’- although I do occasionally make such studies, but that’s all they are- my paintings are very much studio creations developed from many different approaches and, from my experience of watching the show I would be competing against some serious professional and experienced ‘plein air’ painters. And to make a painting in four hours? Well, many of my paintings are actually created in less time than that as they are very pared down and I often find myself overdoing it when I work too long on a painting. How to retain the qualities that mark my own work out and not make a poor attempt at trying to compete with the plein air artists and do something that retains some vitality in four hours, these were the questions that, with the Rocky soundtrack in my ears, I considered as I set to work. I had six weeks before I went in mid-August. I must say it was an exciting distraction from the pandemic and the months I had spent in lockdown. 

Many of the locations, though not all, are often on country estates in parts of rural England and when I was told I would be painting at an as yet unspecified location in High Wycombe I of course googled the area. I thought the most likely place would be a large National Trust estate called West Wycombe Park or possibly an airfield nearby. I was hoping for the airfield! But either way I knew that, unlike my paintings set in the urban West Midland edgelands at night, I would be painting scenery that would be very unlike anything I was used to painting and in the daytime too. With this in mind I spent time in the studio making small studies based on photographs I had been taking on my lockdown walks in local green spaces such as woods and fields trying to build up a painting vocabulary for painting such things that felt my own. The studies were also influenced initially by favourite artists I often lean on such as Lois Dodd, Alex Katz, Fairfield Porter, Diebenkorn and De Kooning, as well as Daubigny and Morandi. I also watched lots of youtube videos by ‘landscape’ artists to gain some useful technical tips, especially about mixing suitable colours for painting terrain, but soon got bored of this. Much of it seemed as far away from my idea of painting as it could possibly be and quite depressing. 

...at RAF Cosford Museum, Telford

The most useful work I did was actually going out and working on location but this also took some refining as it was quite hard to find suitable locations that ticked the boxes of where I may find myself painting in the competition. Plus the practical considerations of working more seriously ‘en plein air’, such as organising and carrying your equipment, setting up, what size to work on and discovering how long I needed to work. Could I do it in four hours? I had a few false starts working on small panels at Edgbaston Reservoir, which I didn’t like, before taking a bigger canvas and working in a small cemetery overlooking a very old church on top of a hill with tremendous views over the Worcestershire countryside. I would have been happy to just paint the view but I felt tackling the church would be important. This went ok, but after 2 hours tops I was done. 

Next I went to RAF Cosford of all places, the magnificent airforce museum near Telford, and set up in the grounds there to paint a large plane and hangar. Rather typically it turns out a society of artists that specialised in painting aeroplanes was having a conference there that day! In my experience these sorts of artists are not only technically proficient in a way that I could not hope to be, but also incredibly particular about detail, but when one of them eventually wandered over to me, which I was dreading, he was very complimentary about my rough looking painting. Another passer-by started talking about that ‘artist on the telly, very good he is, can’t remember his name…’ ‘Bob Ross’ I said tersely as I knew it would be Bob Ross. ‘That’s him. Does great clouds…’ My clouds weren’t looking very good. I went home- this time after 2 ½ hours-having a crisis about clouds realising that I hadn’t actually in 30 years of painting really painting them. I looked at the work of some of my favourite contemporary landscape paintings and oddly realised that they never did too. You’ll never see a cloud in a George Shaw landscape. I spent the next few days practising nothing but clouds very badly. I eventually ended up with ‘Skatepark’. 

'Skatepark', oil on canvas, 50 x 75cms, 2020

In between all this there were lots of contracts and disclaimers to sign, a telephone interview ‘all about me’ with the show’s producer- which was very enjoyable, and a timetable for the day sent through (though still no confirmation of the venue), as well as someone arriving from the ‘art team’ picking my submission painting up to take to the production. The show’s production team were incredibly helpful and friendly, and in all my experiences of working in the artist-run and publicly funded realm of exhibitions, which has been such a slog over the years having to chase after everything, it was great to be treated so nicely but also so professionally as an artist, as if you really mattered and were actually the artist by the way. 

Finally, a few days before I went to the competition I went up to my friend Liz’s farm and worked in a field there next to a lake by a house with a great reflection in the water. This painting was by far the best and biggest one- 75 x 50cms- I had made so far under these conditions and it took me just over 3 hours. I was beginning to feel more prepared, and after much consideration I decided to take a bit of a gamble and take the biggest canvas I was allowed at 120 x 100cms, knowing that I am more comfortable working big, and also this would suit the timescale. I did buy two of them though. By this point I had also invested in quite a large toolbox on wheels to carry my large tubes of paint, the countless brushes I use, and my bottles of medium, palette, easel etc. ‘Plein Air’ painting is meant to be more portable with the artist travelling light with his pachode box, but not me. I prefer to follow David Hockney’s example, but without all the personal assistants! 

...working at Liz's Farm (thanks Liz!)

I felt that all this preparation had been important, but I did feel, and you might share this view too on reading this, that I had got to a point where I was overthinking it all. It was a big deal for me though. Painting is the only thing I feel I'm pretty good at in my life. It’s a chance to get some important exposure as an artist and take part in a big competition where the winner is awarded a prestigious £10,000 commission. It also seemed conversely a risky thing to be doing in case you made the worst painting you have ever made in front of an enormous TV audience. A couple of days before I was due to take part it was confirmed that we would indeed be working at West Wycombe Park and would be required on set at 7am until 7pm. The afternoon before I headed off with all my gear in the car to a travelodge in High Wycombe where I would be spending the night with just me and my nervous thoughts. It felt like I was heading off to battle...

End of Days

 It’s been such an intense, surreal and difficult year. Even so I think I’m in a better situation than many with regards to the pandemic and its effects on my life. I have a good, steady job as a Fine Art lecturer which has continued since March, a roof over my head, food on the table, space for my kids to play outside. At one point in time these were seen as almost the given basics if you could hold down a job, but since the Eighties and Thatcherism, accelerated at unbelievable speed since 2010, so many have seen a complete degradation in their job conditions, can barely manage to find and keep an affordable home, and even put food on the table. These things have preyed a lot on my mind lately and especially over the Christmas period.

It’s the incredible work of scientists, hopefully with the vaccine, that will help the world return to some sort of, albeit deeply scarred, normality in 2021, but I think it’s important to acknowledge how our cultural lives can offer so much support as a way of navigating ourselves through difficult periods in our lives. Art, music, books, film, theatre and TV can be incredibly inspiring, affirming and consoling as we see aspects of our lives reflected back at us- it’s what I seek in much of the culture I seek out- but also can be a great escape from it all. I’ve been thinking about what I have discovered this year that has helped me through these times….

'Death of Winston Rose', Denzil Forrester, oil on canvas, 1981

With galleries closed for so much of this year I’ve not been to see much art, but before lockdown in March I loved visiting the exhibition of paintings by Denzil Forrestor. ‘Itchin’ and Scratchin’, at Nottingham Contemporary. That was a definite highlight of the year- the paintings were so full of life, be it in the character’s lived depicted in the scenes of the Afro-Caribbean community of dub clubs and tough streets, or in the artist’s very sophisticated use of colour and form and his use of drawing in his vast, complex compositions. They had something to say that felt borne out of a lived experience and possessed a sincerity, directness and honesty that reached out to a wider audience. They were a refreshing change to so much art on display and spoke deeply to me, taking me back to some of my own formative roots in painting. I looked closely at Denzil’s paintings as a student in the early 1990’s, and even had tutorials with him, and learned a lot of lessons from his work which I still apply. There is a great lively interview with Denzil on the ‘TalkArt’ podcast that you can find on many podcast apps. I use Castbox to download or stream the regular ones I listen to.  

Poet Roger Robinson (photo courtesy of The Guardian)

Sort of related, in the sense that his work is rooted in his experience of being a member of the black community in Britain and also in the Caribbean, Roger Robinson’s award winning book of poetry, ‘A Portable Paradise’, is the book that had the biggest emotional impact on me this year. Many of the poems deal with the Grenfell fire tragedy and are incredibly moving, and unsurprisingly upsetting, causing a tightening across the chest in this reader. Others deal with the experience of being an immigrant, a refugee, or a black artist in words that have a calm anger, wisdom and clarity of vision. In the year of Black Lives Matter and where we are all hopefully (I know this is probably naïve but I certainly am) thinking with a greater awareness of the experience of black people in this country and the US in particular the book is very prescient. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Comus as featured on compilation by Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs 'Gather In The Mushrooms'

If I were to choose any music that has been a good companion this year it will be the discovery of some of the thematic compilation albums of music created by Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs. This began with ‘Gather In The Mushrooms’, an album recommended in the ‘A Year In The Country’ book I have discussed in previous recent posts (this, alongside Mark Fisher’s ‘The Weird and the Eerie’, would be my other book of the year for how many cultural doors it has opened to me), a collection of Psych and Acid Folk Music from the late sixties and early seventies, whose songs from a wide variety of artists is rooted in a slightly otherworldly English folk tradition. I love it and found myself really immersed in its musical landscape during the long summer evenings in the studio. A particular standout track is ‘The Herald’ by Comus, which is such a stunningly atmospheric song. I have a vivid memory of painting late one evening in July a scene of local woods and sitting exhausted at about midnight having finished the painting as this haunting track played on my Walkman and filled the room. I was pleased with the painting but the whole experience felt quite emotional: the effort of painting, my tiredness, the somewhat heady transportation of the album’s music to this amazing end track and coping with the whole pandemic and the effect it has had on my family in various ways.

This album remains my favourite of the compilations but I have also loved ‘English Weather’, a collection of early Seventies rock, in its broadest sense, by long forgotten and overlooked bands, ‘The Tears Of Technology’, also dubbed ‘the sadness of synthesizers’, a superb collection of late seventies and early Eighties English synth and electronic bands and solo artists including the brilliant lost classic ‘Private Plane’ by Thomas Lear (And if the opening short melancholy instrumental opening track by China Crisis doesn’t floor you well I just can’t help you, I really can’t). The most recent one I bought was the brilliant ‘Tim Peaks’, a collection of lost indie Eighties classics interweaved with more recent music by various artists with a binding link to the aesthetic of early Factory records (well apparently according to Bob Stanley and Tim Burgess who put this one together). Conceptually it is also a reimagining of Twin Peaks and it’s diner being relocated to a café in North West England and is thus an imaginary soundtrack to a late wintry afternoon near the Pennines with a mug of tea and a great jukebox in the corner looking through rain lashed windows. I like afternoons like these and have had my fair share of them when I lived up north in the West Riding.

In all of these records the sleeve notes are lovingly and enthusiastically presented by Stanley and Wiggs. It’s like listening to a great compilation tape put together with the joy and care of an older brother or good friend. It brings back fond memories for me of these experiences in my twenties when a new compilation tape would land on the doorstep from one of brothers at Uni, or the hours I spent putting one together for them or my wife. It seems from a time when these things seem to matter more.

The Adam Buxton Podcast (with dog Rosie)

Other listening pleasures include the Adam Buxton podcast of which I have listened to all 147 episodes now. It’s a great companion on the bus journey to and from work. Adam Buxton is a brilliant interviewer and in his ‘Ramble Chats’ manages to pull off the trick of seeming like he isn’t really trying in fascinating, funny, sometimes irreverent, in-depth talks with comedians, poets, writers, political and social thinkers, legends where Buxton is always warm and engaged. Two recent ones with the poet/activist Benjamin Zephaniah and Paul McCartney were compelling and brilliant. I could highlight so many more, but you should check it out yourself. I don’t know anything about so many of the people interviewed beforehand but always get something out of each podcast.

'The Mandolorian' on Disney+

And my escapism? That would have to be ‘The Mandolorian’, the Star Wars spin off series on Disney+. How cool is that show? I love it and is everything the Star Wars prequels and recent sequels have promised but never really delivered on, from the great storylines but also the design of it all, which is always the part of Star Wars that has made the deepest impression on my imagination from when I saw it as a kid.

It looks like 2021 is going to continue to be a rough ride for several months still, so hang on in there. Thanks to all those who continue to support me and show an interest in my work. Wishing you all well into 2021...

https://www.frieze.com/article/denzil-forrester-i-had-find-something-shook-me

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jun/13/roger-robinson-poets-can-translate-trauma

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2017/jan/26/bob-stanley-and-pete-wiggs-present-english-weather-review-ace

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/aug/29/adam-buxton-dad-more-proud-of-me-but-he-was

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/mar/24/the-mandalorian-review-baby-yoda-has-finally-come-to-the-uk-was-it-worth-the-wait-disney

Still On The Road...Just

work in progress, oil on canvas, 120 x 150cms, 2020

I’m just posting to let you know that I’ve re-designed, updated and published a new version of my website. It’s still at the same address: www.shaunmorrispaintings.com.

It was forced upon me when I realised how different my website looked on the mobile phone, with all my titles and information absent. After contacting my site provider, ‘Portfoliobox’ (who I would really recommend) I was told I was using an old template and would need to do the whole thing again! Luckily (sort of) they migrated all of my images to the new version and I was left to plod on redesigning it over the last few months, able to keep the old one until I was ready to publish this new site. It’s been pretty easy, but just time consuming, but I’m pleased with how it looks. I’ve rationalised much of the work too into fewer portfolios of work, but most of it remains just in a different format. I’ve also added a shop to make it more accessible to buy my work as well as other things such as T-Shirts, Tote bags, and the Indigo Octagon Publications. I aim to use the store to showcase different pieces each month but as most of the work is for sale on my website, I just hope it gives anyone interested a guide to the prices of my artwork if they were interested in buying. I also hope to hold online sales of certain pieces of work for a limited period every 3 months next year, but that scares me a bit so we’ll see.

Exhibition at College view

Last weekend I delivered a recent painting, ‘Winter Field’, to an Open Exhibition at the General Office Art Gallery and Studios in Stourbridge. It’s an artist run set-up that’s been operating for the last 2 years or so, and is a welcome cultural addition to the Black Country Arts Scene which has seen the closure of many galleries in recent years including Dudley Museum and Art Gallery. For me, after a torrid year for all of us, but for so many artists including myself who has had two exhibitions cancelled this year due to Covid, it just felt great taking along a painting and showing again. The exhibition is due to open in January all being well, but will also be available to see online.

'Lockdown' (left) and 'The Green Door' (right)

'Limbs' (left) and 'Morning Way' (right)

'The Edge Of The Field' (left) and 'The Herald' (right)

And finally, I also in the last fortnight at work I also decided, quite spontaneously, to exhibit a few paintings in the corridor near the Art Department. There is a nice generous wall space there. It’s been an awful year due to Covid, but for me it’s also been one of my most consistently creative for a long time, with my painting as ever sustaining me during what continues to be a very challenging time. It’s been great to back teaching though and in amongst the community of students and I’ve been trying to deliver projects that ask the students to reflect on some of their own but also our collective experiences of the last few months, which is exactly what I’ve been doing since March too. I’m on a real creative journey, so It only seemed right to share some of my work too. I chose not to show my current work though, I’m not ready for that, but the more vibrant, colourful paintings I made from March to August. I’m so glad I did too- not only did they look great at college, but I had such a positive response from my social media friends it felt like I had had a small online exhibition of sorts. It felt really worthwhile.

Merry Christmas. Stay Safe.

 

Go on...treat yourself!

'The Far Field', oil on canvas, 30 x 40cms, 2020

I’m pleased to say I’m one of a small number of artists now represented by ‘Small Works Art Gallery’: www.smallworksartsgallery.com,  

It's a new online gallery platform set up by local Birmingham based but American born artist and recent Slade graduate Monica Perez Vega. Its aim is to sell modest scale (nothing bigger than 40cms either way) and modestly priced artwork directly from the site. I’ve got three small paintings available for now which if you are after a Christmas bargain...? 

'The Way', oil on panel, 30 x 30cms, 2020

Monica thought my work was too cheap, and she’s probably right but it is a hard one to judge as most artists will tell you (I think, but I’m not entirely sure of that- some artists seem to have no qualms about charging a fortune!). However, I would prefer to keep things more modestly priced so people may be more tempted to buy an original painting which I sincerely believe is a wonderful, enriching thing to live with. I have my own small collection of art bought from artists in a similar position to me and I just love having these artworks around me, although I find it very difficult to select things that I think I can live with, but in their own quiet way these artworks add a real richness to one’s life that’s hard to describe.  

Go on, you know you want to...treat yourself, it’s been an awful year...

www.smallworksartgallery.com

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. 

Into The Zone....

oil on canvas, 120 x 60cms, work on progress

 I thought I would try and write today about some new work I’ve been making this week which I feel is the beginning of a more coherent series of new paintings after two quite experimental years of working and attempt to explain some of the context this work is developing out of.

 The work in the last two years, but more especially in recent months, has felt a bit all over the place. The paintings I’ve made recently based on my lockdown walks and appreciation of the nature and the phenomenal spring we experienced in the early days of the pandemic, although I felt compelled to make some work based on this, after a few months I felt the work was hitting a fairly creative dead end.  I want to open up new paths that does include this new focus on nature but also reconcile with my ‘edgelands’ themed interests. I just haven’t quite known how...

'A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields' by Stephen Prince

It’s not insignificant to discuss that bubbling away in my thinking whilst in the studio has been the stuff I’ve been reading, and watching, whilst in lockdown. Most notably the book ‘A Year In The Country: Wandering Through Spectral Fields: Journeys in Otherly Pastoralism, the Further Reaches of Folk and the Parallel Worlds of Hauntology’. by Stephen Prince, which has been a follow on read from Mark Fisher’s ‘The Weird and the Eerie’, with many overlapping themes discussed.

 ‘A Year In The Country’ is a collection of 52 incredibly well-researched chapters, one for each week of the year, that goes in search of the darker, eerier side of nature and the bucolic countryside dream by looking at films of a certain genre, books, TV series and music. It covers everything from folkloric film and literature to electronic music to acid folk to folk horror to the dystopian fiction of John Wyndham and the classic unearthings of Nigel Kneale, to the formation of underground record labels like Trunk, Ghost Box and Finders Keepers. It explores a vast range of avenues to bring together not only a sense of how far reaching and varied the origins, mainstays and current players of genres such as folk horror or hauntology can be, but crucially also how they intertwine and cross pollinate. Each chapter expertly charts its chosen subject’s impact upon the public consciousness as well as indicating that these artefacts are now part of a greater cultural cobweb that may well have threads and components that are radically different in genre or style but that equally have a strong commonality in their sense of unease and their haunted content. Further investigations delve into folklore, TV public information films and the landscape itself as a medium through which a certain mood, an uncanny, can be evoked. 

oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2020

I think many of these qualities have often been implicit in my own work in landscape painting, although somewhat unconsciously on my part, but remarked upon by my artist friends Andrew Smith and Hugh Marwood, who I have collaborated with. This book  however, has been useful in helping me bring them into sharper focus in recent months to help things move forward. The book has inspired an enormous reading and watching list, and notebooks full of thoughts, and of books, films and TV I’m now trying to seek out. Typically, despite subscriptions to both Netflix, Amazon Prime and the BFI I can’t find hardly any of the films and TV I’m now keen to seek out (the BFI has some).

 As mentioned, the lockdown walks found me wanting to seek a deeper connection with nature in my painting but still keep in my work a connection to my direct experience of living in the outskirts of town on the edge of an estate. Many of my recent paintings before lockdown have tried to evoke an interest in a darker, sometimes uncanny, sense of existence that can live parallel alongside the seemingly ordinary and mundane. They also hold many of my own anxieties about being a parent to a particularly vulnerable child and trying to keep him safe as he grows up and seeks his independence in this environment.  

oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, work in progress

I have also been thinking about the teenage memories I carry of the ordinary nature I experienced around me growing up on a council estate in the West Midlands. Our house backed onto a field, which I crossed to secondary school every day, but also crossed in the dark on the way home from the pub or a friend’s house, where it did not feel safe and even foolish to do so. I often did this on canal towpaths too or under the by-way beneath the M5 motorway where I often walked to my friends to rehearse with our band, also crossing a rather dangerous railway line. These places didn’t feel that safe in the day either though. You would often encounter groups of older lads there and suddenly feel very exposed and vulnerable in that field or down that track on your own, the estate where you lived just five minutes away, in sight, but yet feeling suddenly out of reach. I often found myself ‘legging it’ to home, but also on occasion being surrounded by a gang and being roughed up and shoved about, called names and forced to give up anything you might have (which in those days wasn’t much, but these days the technology on our pockets makes us more vulnerable). This sort of experience, in these sorts of places, is really well evoked in Shane Meadows’ film ‘Dead Man’s Shoes’ from 2004, which I mentally hold as some sort of marker in my thinking about the landscape and some of these memories.

still from 'A Field In England', directed by Ben Wheatley

The films of director Ben Wheatley are discussed in ‘A Year In The Country’, in particular ‘A Field In England’ set entirely in a field during a day in the English Civil War, which led me to buy and watch it recently. The story deals with a group of army deserters who ‘after ingesting some magic mushrooms fall victim to the powerful psychic energies of the mystical field’. I liked it a lot, not least the beautiful black and white cinematography, but also it explores an idea of the field being like a stage, with many buried past histories and occurrences, where the whole story that unfolds takes place.  I can also see a link to Sergei Tarkovsky’s eerie sci-fi film, ‘Stalker’, which is also discussed by both Fisher and Prince and which I have also recently watched. The film depicts a journey through an enigmatic post-apocalyptic landscape, where hired guide—the Stalker—leads a writer and a professor into the heart of the Zone, the restricted site of a long-ago disaster, apparently a landing by an alien spaceship, where the three men eventually travel to the Room, a place rumored to fulfill one’s most deeply held desires. The film is an adaptation of a science-fiction novel by Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, ‘Roadside Picnic’, which I also recently finished reading. I’m also now reading ‘Zona’ by Geoff Dyer, a very funny and engaging book about the film, examined scene by scene with lots of interesting digressions, and the author’s obsession with it, to complete my experience of it. 

still from 'Stalker', directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979

All of which sort of leads me to these new paintings. Here we are, alone and exposed in an open muddy field occupied by large ominous looking pylons on the edge of a nearby housing estate. The day is turning to dusk, seeking to evoke some of those anxious feelings of being trapped in a place, a zone, surrounded by dark trees as autumn fades to winter, home just in sight but still far away, trying to beat the clock and get home before night descends…

                                                  

oil on canvas, 20 x 20cms, work in progress

I’m developing the paintings using some reference photographs my photographer friend, Laura took on a trip we made to this sight, which is how I’ve often developed earlier series of work based on motorways and canals. The paintings I’m sharing here aren’t quite complete-I would like to add more highlights on the pylons-but are not that far off. It feels really exciting to be working on a series of works again though and the subject matter is helping me push the language of my painting into newer territories that I’m really enjoying too. Most importantly it seems to be helping to coalesce all these ideas, experiences and influences of recent months into a more tangible form…