Here are a couple of new still lives.
Looking at this ever increasing set of paintings on the studio floor last
night, I’ve decided to push on and commit to making a lot more and to exhibit
them at this year’s annual Arts Festival we hold in the college where I work.
I’ve been allocated a space where I was
going to display a range of my ‘Edgelands’ studies and drawings, but I don’t
really feel ready for this. I more feel the need to really do something with
these still lives, try and make another 20 in the next month, and to hopefully
explore it all with a bit more purpose and depth, and get it out of my system. I
then want to then exhibit them as a big collection on the wall. Discussing the
work for the first time with colleagues at work today seemed to garner a
positive response, which helps me feel a bit more confident about the idea.
In exhibiting them publicly for the first
time, I hope to somehow link them in more closely with my ‘Edgelands’ theme. In
my original proposal I had discussed the idea of still lives based on things
found on the locations that attract me, and this seems to be increasingly emerging
with these pieces: the empty, discarded and mundane detritus left behind in the
motorway service station, the out of town shopping mall or retail park.