Recent Painting, oil on canvas, 2019
The nights
have drawn in. I find this time of year, with the dark and cold and the uphill
grind towards the end of a long teaching term, my least favourite. It feels
like my body is often closed in on
itself as I leave for work on dank, chilly mornings, ride the bus with a
podcast for company (usually the brilliant Adam Buxton Podcast), creep into
work, teach and mark student work all day, creep back out to the bus stop in
the dark, get home to the family who are all as tired as each other before
finally having some time to myself when I get the kids to bed about 9pm. And
then….I head to the studio if I can on 2 or 3 nights, work till about 11pm- I
seem to have a renewed energy while working, but am knackered after, then I collapse
into bed and rise again the next morning to repeat it all over again. It’s not
like this at other times in the year but these weeks from mid-November till
Xmas always feel a bit like this. I love to get to January....
Recent Painting, oil on canvas, 2019
I have not
managed to work on any larger paintings, but I have done a few smaller and
mid-size paintings which I’m pleased with which have proven to be a bit more
diverse. From ketchup bottles on a burger bar counter to recycling bins outside
the local supermarket I’ve tried to source suitable subjects as a vehicle for
getting more colour in the paintings and just to keep stretching what I do.
Recent Painting, oil on canvas, 2019
Recent Painting, oil on canvas, 2019
I also did
this painting (at top of the post) of a lorry on this long, wide canvas that I had bought thinking
it would be good if I could develop something for this unusual format. I had a
few weeks previously taken some interesting photos of some huge lorries
refuelling at a service station on a rainy night travelling back from London by
coach with students. I made the painting late one night ten days after 39
bodies of migrants being trafficked from Vietnam were found in the back of a similar
refridgerated lorry in Essex. This story seemed to give the image of this
vehicle pulled up in the dead of night outside some bland non-descript building
a different sort of resonance and feeling held in the oil on canvas…
