Thursday, 7 November 2024

'Like A Song With No End'...

'Fallen Leaves', oil on canvas, 20 x 25cms, 2024

Following on from my last post about my exhibition, ‘Like A Song With No End’ at Rugby Art Gallery and Museum, here is the press release and statement, with some of the smaller paintings that were on display, that I collaborated on with my friend, Amanda Kumariah. This was quite a different exhibition than other solo ones I have presented. The paintings contained a much more diverse range of subject matter, with more personal themes and thoughts held in the work and the observations and experiences that informed it’s gestation. Amanda really helped me express some of this in her editing and shaping of the accompanying statement. Thanks, Amanda...
'Fallen Leaves' (Ben), oil on canvas, 25 x 20cms, 2024

“Like a Song with No End,” presents my first portraits in many years. They depict Jack, Richard and Ben, all men at work as a delivery driver, a social worker on call, and an artist respectively. In these portraits, I wanted to explore not only the people, but also the spaces where they spend much of their time, endeavouring to reveal the psychological relationships the subjects have with these spaces. 
'Fallen Leaves', oil on canvas, 25 x 20cms, 2024

The solitary figure is also to be found in my other paintings set in the landscape, whether they are walking in the woods in winter, on a barge approaching us along the canal in autumn, or zipping along the towpath on an e-scooter, the spring hawthorn an abundant backdrop. 

I don’t want to tell people how to look at my work, but painting, like the process of writing this statement, is a push and pull of how much to tell and how to tell it. These paintings contain my thoughts about three generations of men in my own family, including myself, and their personal journeys. Despite the immediacy of my subject matter, its themes are far-reaching. These landscape paintings hold for me experiences of aimlessness, uncertainty, belonging and solitude. The solitary figures in my work are journeying through life, with destination unknown, and feelings of being off-centre or out of place prevail beneath even the sunnier landscapes. 
'There Is A World', oil on canvas, 120 x 180cms, 2022-24
I want the exhibition to contain many different threads to pick up and pull. I see so many exhibitions where an artist’s work is neatly wrapped up in some sort of conceptual package, but I don’t work like that. I want the work to feel more authentic to my everyday experiences and thinking, which is someone messy and chaotic and does not fit into a box. I think you, the audience, might understand that, because perhaps your lives are like that too.

The paintings attempt to place themselves in the present, but with a line of connection to previous artists, whose influences ebb and flow into the work across many centuries, including the paintings of Giotto and the early Florentine artists, Eastern Painting traditions and even the cave paintings of Lascaux. In the end, I don’t view my paintings as figurative or abstract. When thinking about them, I am often reminded of a quote from the painter Richard Diebenkorn, who stated, “Abstract means literally to draw from or separate. In this sense, every artist is abstract, for he must create his own work from his visual impressions. A realistic or non-objective approach makes no difference. The result is what counts.”

'Winter Morning', oil on canvas, 100 x 120cms, 2021
Painting is as much an expression of the painter as it is of the world around them. We almost cannot “help” bringing ourselves into our work, in more surprising ways that we realise. There are hidden meanings which I consciously work into my paintings, but when I step back, I notice recurring themes subconsciously expressed too.

I have held many exhibitions of my paintings over the years, and I always enjoy putting collections of different ones together. Much like life itself, my paintings evolve naturally from one thing to the next, like a song with no end. This exhibition celebrates the repetition and beauty of the song we are in, as artists and as human beings, a beautiful song with no end.

Thursday, 17 October 2024

Like A Song With No End: June 2024

 

'Thomas of Gloucester', oil on canvas, 120 x 150cms, 2023

My frequent blogger activity, for over 10 years now, has certainly been usurped by my use of Instagram, but I do miss writing something a bit more thoughtful and coherent, and after a recent solo exhibition, I thought it was a bit overdue to write something in more detail. To stop, pause and rewind…

I finished June earlier this year having completed a whole host of different artistic activities. It was only as July began to arrive that I found myself looking back with a sense of relief on the last few weeks and saying to myself ‘did I really do all that in just one month?’. This is despite recovering from recent treatment in the form of major abdominal surgery for prostate cancer at the beginning of May. 
'Thinking Of A Colour', oil on canvas, 120 x 100cms, 2024



In the first 2 weeks of June, I held a new solo exhibition at Rugby Art Gallery and Museum which I called ‘Like A Song with No End’. It comprised the most varied mixture of mostly new paintings and prints that I have exhibited. Many of the paintings on display had been completed in the last six months, whereas a few I chose to exhibit were a bit older. The exhibition included 3 key portraits of my nephew, Jack and my friends Richard and Ben, a van driver, social worker, and an artist respectively. The paintings depicting these men at work were based on drawings and photographs I’d made whilst spending time with them, usually at their homes. 

I had approached these new ones differently, making a series of supporting drawings and photographs and spending more time with the sitters. I used to avoid any photography when I was creating portrait paintings years ago, somewhat bizarrely it seems now, but the rigour I held then in not using them was also very useful. I was just interested in recording the sitters face in a single drawing, which I would then use to inform the painting I would make back in the studio. I was a bit relentless, never wavering from quite strict imposed limits: just a drawing; same scale; no stories; no dramatic lighting, no background… I look back and reflect that I was a bit like the character of the Athlete interviewed by the protagonist journalist, Frank Bascombe, in Richard Ford’s novel ‘The Sportswriter’.

'So, You Are Tired', oil on canvas, 120 x 150cms, 2024



Another big difference in these portraits is that they are all based in different settings, with the paintings attempting to explore the relationship between the individuals and the places they occupy when they are working. I think this is most exciting in the portrait of Jack in his van where the two become really integrated, which is what the paintings are about, but I think they are all have a strength in this aspect, but ‘Driver’s Story’ has a more confident energy than the others.  I think they are all interesting paintings though and they are different to anything I have done before. I’m now thinking of how I can develop this into a larger series. 

'Driver's Story', oil on canvas, 150 x 120cms, 2023 at Rugby Museum and Art Gallery

Installation at Rugby Museum and Art Gallery

Three other paintings in the exhibition also contained the figure. These were in paintings where I had experimented with placing a figure in my usually unpopulated landscape paintings. The paintings, ‘Thomas of Gloucester’, ‘Winter Thoughts’ and ‘There Is a World’, held for me more personal reflections about three generations of the men in my family: my Grandad, my dad, and myself as a young man. The paintings all hold certain feelings of uncertainty, loss and transition and have a more romantic quality in their relationship to the tradition of landscape painting. This is a bit more present because of the inclusion of the figures, which also suggest some sort of narrative. The other paintings I chose for the exhibition were ones that I felt complemented and extended out from these key pieces.

'Winter Thoughts', oil on canvas, 120 x 120cms, 2022

'There Is A World', oil on canvas, 120 x 180cms, 2022-24

'Asleep Under Snow', oil on canvas, 80 x 100cms, 2022

I also hung a wall of smaller paintings, ‘Fallen Leaves’, that were an attempt to close in and extend the story in certain details from the larger pieces. Some of these were completed in the weeks just prior to the exhibition after my surgery and were enjoyable to do after the trauma of surgery but in the end, I felt the wall was just a bit too busy and the exhibition didn’t need them. Still…you try…

'Fallen Leaves', all oil canvas, dimensions vary 


I had a nice private view, and the exhibition was received well by visitors who left some very positive comments. I was really pleased with the exhibition too. It had a more ‘homely’ and personal feel that I have been trying to mine in one way or another for several years. There was a wider range of work and themes running through the work on display with various threads to pick up and pull. It felt like it could be this, or it could be that, or it could be this again… and because of that it felt more somehow more ‘real’ and, for me at least, possessed undercurrents of being like a play, poem, story or film.  At the end of the day though, I just hope that it was an engaging exhibition about painting. My very good friend, Amanda, who has been a huge support during these difficult few months, helped me write a good press release that expressed some of these ideas which I will share on a post following on from this one. 

Yours truly on 'The Monkey Jamboree', Black Country FM Radio

I also had chance to discuss the exhibition when I was a guest on Black Country FM Extra’s ‘The Monkey Jamboree’ Sunday night radio show, which is hosted by my friend Mark ‘Busby’ Burrows. This was my second time on the show, and I have really enjoyed it both times, and I get to select 6 of my favourite tracks to play, which is a real thrill. It’s a wonderful feeling when you hear some of your favourite music coming out of the radio. There was something quite moving about it too. This time around I chose music that had formed some sort of a soundtrack to the paintings. In case you are interested (and should you have missed the show!) these were: 


‘Right Back To It’- Waxahatchee
‘Darkness and Cold’- Purple Mountains
‘Newcastle’- Lankum
‘Cool Water’- Kurt Vile
Marrs'- John Grant
‘The Open Window’- HR Smoke 
‘Drowning in Plain Sight’- The Delines

You can check them all out on Spotify I’m sure, although it would be better if you bought the records so these great artists can make more amazing music…I also talked about my experience of being diagnosed with Prostate Cancer, which I was unsure and nervous about being open about, yet I was also keen to raise awareness of it for other men, as it can often go undetected until it is too late. 1 in 8 men are affected by it. I was, for once in my life, quite proud of myself for talking about it. 

Me and artist friend, Ben Sadler in front of my portrait of him at 'Bostin' Midlands Painters' at The Moonraven Gallery, Birmingham

Later in the month I exhibited my portrait of Ben, ‘Thinking Of A Colour’ in an exhibition I was invited to participate in called ‘Bostin’ Midlands Painters’ at a new Birmingham venue, The Moonraven Gallery. It was a very diverse show of a multitude of painters from the region, including comedian and TV presenter Joe Lycett, and it was nice to be asked to exhibit. I told my mom Joe Lycett was in it too, but she was less than impressed. “His paintings are rubbish’ she said, so that TV glitter failed to work it’s magic on her. He never turned up at the private view anyway. But I went to the PV, had a drink and a look around and a chat with a few artists, including Ben who was also exhibiting, before dashing over to Redditch to play my bass for HR Smoke, the band I’m in, for a 45 min set at The Glastonbeoley Music Festival that evening. Rock n roll! 
Bass playing legend...

Andrew Smith aka HR Smoke
Carl Taylor on guitar
Ed on drums
The week before we had also played a longer set at a local venue as a ‘warm-up’ practice gig too. The festival was great fun, if not a bit scary, but I’ve really enjoyed this extension to my creative activities more and more in recent months, especially now we are a four-piece band with the addition of Carl on guitar and Ed on drums, whereas previously, and for a few years now, it was just me and Andy, the singer and the songwriter, playing together. After the set at the festival, I felt a really nice sense of camaraderie with the other guys as we had our photo taken by Carl’s girlfriend, Suzie in the HR Smoke T shirts Andy had kindly had made for us for the event, that I struggle to find as an artist where I just plug away at the work and the attempt to promote it alone.  This all happened in the last weekend of June. 

HR Smoke, the band...

I told you had done a lot… After my surgery at the beginning of May where I wondered whether I would be able to fulfil any of these commitments, I had done so many different and exciting things… what a wonderful month it had been. I owe a huge thanks to all those friends and family who supported me through it. 

Tuesday, 6 February 2024

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….

Tuesday, 5 December 2023

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. 

Monday, 4 December 2023

'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. 

Friday, 10 November 2023

'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?

Tuesday, 29 August 2023

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.