Painting is Hard....

'Community Engagement Officer', oil on canvas, 120 x 90cms, 2023-24

Occasionally I will stop and think how much painting is extremely difficult to do well. It requires an extraordinary amount of mental stamina and focus, skill and experience which can only be developed with many years of practice in the studio (I’ve now been painting seriously for nearly 35 years), many hours looking at other paintings, and an incredible will and determination. And still it frequently ends up being a complete mess or falling desperately short of what you hoped. So, you carry on…that’s the reason you carry on. It’s either that or give up. 

I haven’t given up, and in the last couple of months I’ve made some new paintings I’m pleased with that I would like to share….

I’m continuing to develop a renewed interest in painting the figure in the landscape, but I’m also interested in developing some more specific portraits of individuals, such as this one of Nick (at top of post), Community Engagement Officer for the Birmingham Canal and River Trust, who has been working with my students. 

I worked on it in the last week before Christmas, before then deciding to repaint the whole thing in about 3 hours in January. It was part of a process of experimenting and trying to decide what I don’t like as much as what I do. This is to develop a language for the portraits that’s a break from the ones I’ve done in the past and thinking about and applying some of the lessons I’ve learned from 12 years of landscape painting since.  Consequently, I’m not sure what I think of this painting just yet, but I know from experience the answer as to how to develop things further is not by doing any more work on this one, but keep doing others and keep exploring…

as yet untitled, oil on canvas, 120 x 150cms, 2023

I’m much happier with this large painting of a canal scene set at a spot I frequently pass on my dog walks and have made two other largeish paintings from, one set in the winter (one of my favourite paintings) and one in the summer. I wanted to do something more autumnal at the same scene and kept returning through late October with my camera, and the dog, to capture the changing autumn colours.  I was inspired by the glorious autumnal fiery colour of the autumn I had witnessed on a recent trip to Scotland, but the colour in the Midlands was rather different… Still, the dun greens, ochres and darker colours were still autumnal. I could have made things fierier with vivid oranges and yellows, but there is something about an authenticity that always nags and sits whispering on my shoulder…

One morning as I took some photos this barge came into view from beneath the bridge and slowly glided past me, it’s owner eyeing me somewhat suspiciously as he passed whilst I took some photos. I was excited and slightly unsettled by the experience, but I’m not sure why. When it came to creating the painting, I decided to include the barge, with the fear that it may look a little twee, but by keeping it quite small enveloped by the surrounding landscape I think I managed to avoid any tweeness. Instead, I think it has captured that unsettling, almost funeral, feeling I felt on the towpath that morning. I think it’s one of the strongest paintings I've made in a long time….

Same book, different page....

'Join Hands', oil on canvas, 120 x 100cms, 2023

I’ve completed two large paintings based on similar, but not the same, observations of people, largely retired, coming together at local parks and playing fields to exercise, but, more importantly, to be with other people. They are an attempt to look at some of the ongoing interests I have in the social and political that underpin many of my paintings through a different, more positive lens.

The unpeopled landscape paintings tend towards the weary and melancholy in feel, sighing under the weight of it all. They depict post-industrial ruins, overlooked spaces on the edges and quiet suburban streets explored on night walks by the stressed insomniac. 

I sometimes think that it can be easier to make a more overt social or political statement in art that can, on the surface, appear more serious, and I think some of my landscape paintings can possess this quality. But I believe these new paintings are just as serious a message about the strength in community, grass roots activism and socialism, and above all the love and understanding we seek and need in life found in friends and the companionship of others. There were lots of groups like this set up by ordinary people post-Covid that I find inspiring. They are also signs of what we are all in our own way looking for-the opportunity to connect with others…

'The Last Days of Disco', oil on canvas, 150 x 200cms, 2023

I called the largest painting ‘The Last Days of Disco’ after a Yo La Tengo song from the album ‘And Then Nothing Turned Itself Out’ which, with the aged figures appearing in some sort of dance, seemed to fit as a title, but I’m wary of it seeming like a mickey-take, which it certainly isn’t. I hoped it appears a more gentle and affectionate title. Interestingly it seems to hark back to my old paintings set in nightclubs made 25 years ago. Still in the same book but on a different page, or even just a bit further down the same one. The other painting, ‘Join Hands’, with the sunlight dappled grass in the large foreground, also seemed to echo the revolving light from the mirrored disco ball. 

'The Polish Rider'...

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

'The Polish Rider', oil on canvas, 90 x 80cms, 2023

As I come to the end of an interesting and experimental (but when is my painting not experimental?) year for my work, I’m pleased to announce that a recent portrait painting, ‘The Polish Rider’, has been selected for an exhibition on the theme of ‘People’ at The Open Gallery in Halifax, West Yorkshire in January 2024. 

The painting depicts a ‘rider’ for one of the many fast-food delivery companies- Deliveroo, Uber, Just-Eat, you name’em- on the pavement on his electric motorbike as he prepares to head towards his next job. The title references Rembrandt’s famous ‘Polish Rider’ painting, painted in the 1650s, of an unknown horse rider battling the harsh elements and terrain of a somewhat murky landscape. 

'The Polish Rider', Rembrandt, c1650s (a bit better than my painting...)

It’s an idealised, ambiguous figure painted in a much sketchier manner than Rembrandt is known for, but my own painting is an attempt to ironically counterpoint the older painting’s romantic idealism, with my rider painted without any ambiguity about the subject. The subject being in this case a low-paid worker from an ethnic minority background in insecure work and a perilous capital realist social situation. The manner in which it is painted, which is somewhat flat-footed and lacking the bravura brushwork of the Dutch Master, is also important. The only shared ambiguity is in the background, but instead of the mountains and romantic terrain of the original, my painting suggests a backdrop of banal shop-fronts and architecture and industrial sized bins in the inner city. 

My favourite part of my painting is that small area of green bin between and beneath the purply lilac sleeve on the left. That’s an exciting area right there!

It’s nice to get this figurative painting selected as I’ve been trying to reintroduce the figure in various ways back into my work this year and extend out from my landscape work. I’ve been exploring various ways to do this in terms of the painterly language, and how to paint the figure again, with some paintings being more successful than others. I’m not sure if ‘The Polish Rider’ is entirely successful (so it’s nice that someone else i.e the Open Gallery, thinks it is), but I think the idea behind the portrait is interesting, although perhaps a little cliched, but I’m beginning to firm up some ideas of ways of making things work better. 

Nicole Eisenman, 'The Triumph of Poverty', 2009

It seems necessary to shed some ways of working I’ve held onto for a long time, particularly the idea that my work must always come from direct observation. Although I still want to root the work in observations of the world around me I need to be more flexible about how I construct the paintings.  This was confirmed by a visit to the Nicole Eisenman exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery I visited last week, which blew my mind. It was the best exhibition I had seen in a very long time; full of original ideas about representing the figure and taking more playful risks with narrative and the language of painting, all pooled from a vast well of different primary and secondary source material, culture, and art history. 

I returned from London wanting to get on with a new portrait I’ve been developing for some time now, and hopefully loosen things up a bit. 

'The Door In The Wall'

 

The artist with artist friend, Andrew Smith installing 'The Door In The Wall' exhibition

My solo exhibition, ‘Night Walks’ overlapped in May with another exhibition in Worcester, ‘The Door In The Wall’, a two-person exhibition that I worked in collaboration on with my artist friend, Andrew Smith at The Hive, the University of Worcester Library which has a large exhibition space. 

This was our second joint exhibition together, the last being ‘Displaced’, in 2021 at Birmingham’s T Street Gallery, We have also collaborated on other exhibitions together with artist, Hugh Marwood over what is now a 13-year period, and as ever, Chris Cowdrill, an illustrator friend who always produces the great publicity material for our different exhibitions, as well as occasionally exhibiting too. There is a sort of shared tone across our respective works that has worked together in the past, and there are lots of benefits to working with other artists like this. 

Painting by Andrew Smith

Andrew has, since lockdown, produced an incredible range of work across different media, including painting, painted photographs, and artist’s books, video and poetry that has stemmed from processes engaged around the TV programme, ‘Homes Under the Hammer’. Taking photographs from the TV show, these are then manipulated in various creative ways, usually with paint, to suggest different, more imaginary, rooms and spaces to the rather dilapidated and careworn rooms of the houses that are sold at auction for renovation by prospective property developers.  

Painting by Andrew Smith

The finished artworks have a very uneasy, haunted quality and are informed by an underlying critique of late capitalism and the property market. For ‘The Door In The Wall’ he decided to exhibit some of the painted photographs and also a selection of some terrific new paintings based on corners of rooms and empty walls, in part in response to the photographs of Uta Barth and ‘Ideal Home’ magazine. Andy wrote a great statement about this which I’ve included at the end of this post. 

Paintings by Shaun Morris

Whilst Andy focussed on the interior world of his painted rooms, my own contribution was presented, intended as a contrast, a selection of my landscape paintings, but with all the work across the exhibition sharing a common interest in the eerie and the uncanny and psychological states related to this. 

'The Green Door' by Shaun Morris

The title for the exhibition came from a short story by H G Wells that details the traversing of its main character from one seemingly real world to another parallel world through the ‘door in the wall’, that was referenced in Mark Fisher’s excellent book ‘The Weird and the Eerie’, which inspired many of the paintings I have made in recent years. 

'The Night Watch', oil on canvas, 100 x 120cms, 2023

I also exhibited some new paintings including a large new portrait, ‘The Night Watch’, of a security guard isolated and entrapped in his ‘sentry’ box, trapped in his circumstances of low paid work borne out of his social background, which represents a nudge in the direction of some of my new work and a renewed interest in the figure. 

'The. Aquarium', oil on canvas, 60 x 90cms, 2023

'TV Dinner', oil on canvas, 45 x 60cms, 2023

 I also exhibited a couple of interior paintings myself, two new still life paintings based on ‘found’ still life subjects in my home. These were of the open, illuminated microwave just off my kitchen and the illuminated fish tank (with poor fish now sadly deceased…) in my darkened living room, the last light I turn off on the way to bed. There was something in the compositions and atmospheric lighting of these scenes that seemed to possess a quiet psychological charge and tension that spoke to me about my relationship with my domestic life I wanted to explore (and want to explore further).

'Figures' oil on canvas, 100 x. 120cms, 2018

The landscapes I presented were paintings from different periods of work from the last few years, with many of them from a rather sombre series I called ‘The Street’ from 2017-2018 which were developed from the unease and stress I felt hung in the air in a post-Brexit, austerity ridden Britain…I think some of them are very good, and they fitted well in the exhibition, especially one called ‘Figures’, but I had to get out of that place for my painting for my own mental well-being, although things are even worse in the country now. 

Paintings by Andrew Smith

Paintings by both of us

Andy felt the exhibition was the best one we had put together so far, but I’m not so sure. I certainly felt Andy’s work was very strong and deserved an exhibition of its own. ‘The Door In The Wall’ did look good but I don’t think the venue served it that well, and we didn’t get many visitors or were supported in getting more of an audience along by The Hive’s marketing, which was disappointed. I personally felt more inclined to try and find another venue at some point, but it’s very unlikely to happen. We carry on…

Artist’s statement – Andrew Smith/HR Smoke (website: andrew-smith-h-r-smoke.com)

Over the past few years I’ve been interested in the TV programme Homes Under the Hammer, partly as a consequence of the period of lockdown and the domestic containment, or confinement, involved with that.  In the private space of my living room I would be able to look into these televised private-become-public-spaces, these other, though basically similar, boxes.  I began to do some work in parallel with the TV programme’s formula/narrative of improvement/development.  The TV rooms before development appealed to me, or touched me perhaps, because of their usually abject state; it felt like you were – the programme’s presenters were – intruding on the traces of some private grief: a death (likely – so a house as memento mori), or the private traces of retreating economic tides (obviously, though this being an opportunity for developers to exploit – and fair play to them, say the presenters of the show: the twin abstractions of money and development mean we need not concern ourselves too much with the historical circumstances by which this house came to the market).  

So I took photos of the TV screen and painted on prints of these – developing the TV rooms by painting out walls or introducing quasi-abstract Paul Klee-like tunnels or corridors, creating more space – as is frequently the case with the developers in the programme (the creating the space, not the Klee reference).  I suppose the structure of the space, in the photo, functioned as something like a constraint into which one could introduce a degree of variation or interruption, and thus experience a kind of freedom.  And I thought about the developers in the programme – their own constraints, financial or whatever (aesthetic?), and the hard work they put in to make the house they’d acquired at auction something that was saleable for profit – that being, so it seemed, the usual reason for developing these places; and I thought about how that related to what I was doing – that is, how peeling these images of rooms off the screen and then elaborating on them and presenting them as art, how that compared to the development work done on TV: something like, an investment/calculation within the field of property, and the various socio-economic forces that structure that, to produce a more or less calculable pay-off, versus an investment in the field of Art, hierarchically structured by various cultural and socio-economic forces, to produce … what … a feeling of imaginative freedom?

The more recent paintings on canvas follow on from an artists’ book – Downstairs Upstairs – in which the photos from the TV (again) are cropped such that they resemble minimalist abstract paintings.  I was thinking of Dan Graham’s Homes for America, in which he points to the similarities between mass housing and Minimalist art, and the photos in Uta Barth’s Ground series.  If situated in relation to Barth’s work, my paintings exemplify a form of non-transcendental abstraction: that is, they do not abstract to produce a rarefied conflation of domestic and gallery space – they are not ideal universalized , corners, walls, doors, as Barth says about her Ground series – rather they gesture towards forms of abstraction whilst remaining, evidently, images of rooms from the bottom end of the housing market: this isn’t LA, it’s Stoke.  Or, to put it another way, the paintings as makeover – a la Homes Under the Hammer – retain a reference to socio-economic origins, or class difference.  The short film Homes Movie (available via QR code in this exhibition) begins with a mock (up) version of Ideal Home magazine, with stills from later in the film juxtaposed with some of Barth’s photos, which don’t look entirely out of place in the magazine context, which I suppose in a sense supports her point that “most empty corners and doorways do look alike, so when a picture of a corner is moved to a new space it still tends to read as relating to that particular location.”  The rest of the film applies some of Barth’s formal tropes – the staring at walls, the edges of things - to footage from Homes Under the Hammer: I don’t think the effect is parodic of either Barth or Homes, but it is something like an exercise in creating a disjunction between form and content.

You can paint yourself into a corner.  You can turn a corner.  In The Poetics of Space, his study of the house, the significances of its interior spaces, Gaston Bachelard describes the corner as “the most sordid of all havens.”  It is, he says, a place for welcome withdrawal, desired immobility: one can retreat into the corner, into oneself – or emerge from the corner, into the world, to find oneself.  The corner is like a “sullen uncommunicative person”, and, also, the place for memories, dreams, reflections, for the imagination – for readings in a universe of dust.  To sit and read a few lines on the ceiling – or to apply a new coat of paint?

Layers....

 

'Another Clockwork Day', oil on canvas, 150 x 120cms, 2023

As we enter September, and are nearly two thirds into 2023, I’ve been reflecting recently on the paintings I’ve made this year. I’m always experimenting in my work, even if it is sometimes just in small incremental ways, but this year I think in my attempt to shift things on and branch out, I am finding I’m making a much more diverse and interesting range of work than I have in some time. 

'The Last Days of Disco', oil on canvas, 150 x 200cms, 2023

''The Night Watch', oil on canvas, 100 x 120cms, 2023

'The Polish Rider', oil on canvas, 90 x 75cms, 2023

Many of these paintings have started to include the figure and include more narrative elements. Many of the paintings also explore the relationship between the figure and different spaces and how to represent this. There are also some ideas developing around my occasional interest in still life painting, this time with studies of ‘found’ still lives around my home. 

'TV Dinner', oil on canvas, 50 x 75cms, 2023

'The Aquariam', oil on canvas, 60 x 90cms, 2023

'Pickle Jar', oil on canvas, 35 x 25cms, 2023

New things are happening that are also in dialogue with older ideas I was interested in many years ago and my landscape work. I see lots of connections, but also as if I am peeling back another layer of the same onion to reveal a bit more of the ongoing different interests I have. 

'The Days Get Dark', oil on canvas, 100 x 120cms, 2023

I’ve no idea what the next painting will be right now and that’s exciting. 

'Night Walks'

 

'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. 

Small studies and sketchbooks

In April I gave a talk to a small group of visitors in the early evening at the library about the exhibition. I had prepared some notes, as when I try and do these things off the cuff, it usually ends in disaster. I thought it might be nice to share what I had written, although the conversation did happily go off in different directions, aided by the many books on artists and ideas, and my sketchbooks and small oil studies which I took along too. So, here goes…

Recommended Reading

‘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.

Permanent Red....

'Permanent Red', oil on canvas, 45 x 60cms, 2023

In the last few weeks, I’ve been on and off busy in the studio working on some new paintings. 

Set at night, they all depict parked up Postal Vans parked at the kerbside outside the postal depot near to where I live. Their compositions are identical, with them all presenting a single darkened van, lit from above, placed in the centre, a verge in front, the orange road behind, and the indistinct shapes of the suburban houses and trees opposite acting as a backdrop against the sky. I am really attracted to the power in this repetition to serve the idea.

'Permanent Red II', oil on canvas, 45 x 60cms, 2023

As I describe them, they sound like they could be stage sets, but I think a great many of my paintings are like that, particularly the nocturnes. At 45 x 60cms they are all the same size, and although they are of single, individual vans, I saw them as part of a larger ‘collective’ group of vans and paintings. 

'Permanent Red III', oil on canvas, 45 x 60cms, 2023

I was motivated to start painting them as I passed them all lined up one evening outside the depot as I walked to town to meet my friend for a pint. They are always lined up like this, but this had been another day of postal strikes, so the view seemed to resonate more acutely as I walked by. I took some photographs on my phone and as I did, I reflected on the incredibly difficult struggle the postal workers are involved in for their jobs and conditions. And as we find ourselves into 2023, I’m thinking so much about the struggle all public sector and key workers are involved in, including myself as a teacher, against this dangerous, far-right, anti-democratic government for not only fair pay, but for the very services that underpin a fair society for all and our very democratic rights. 

'Permanent Red IV', oil on canvas, 45 x 60cms, 2023

Last week, like these Postal Workers, I withdrew my own labour from work and went on Strike. I stood on a cold Picket Line early in the morning with my other Union colleagues and then, as an NEU Rep, was a steward at a huge rally and march through the city, united and proud to stand shoulder to shoulder with other union members and make our voices heard. I see the postal vans, sitting with quiet dignity by the kerbside, as ciphers for the individual workers all over the country, standing collectively, laying down their tools, withdrawing their labour and finally saying ‘enough is enough’. 

'Permanent Red V', oil on canvas, 45 x 60cms, 2023

The title of this post and these paintings, ‘Permanent Red’, is lifted from the title of the book of the same name by art critic, John Berger, which in these ‘Essays in Seeing’ he explores ideas about art and society, democracy, mass demonstrations, cubism, Walt Disney vs Francis Bacon and more. I read it as an postgraduate student, and I still draw inspiration from it nearly 30 years later.