A Marvelous Activity

 

'Livin' On The Edge Of The World', oil on canvas, 80 x 100cms, 2021

I sometimes think of doing other things, but actually it’s much more interesting to paint. It is just a marvellous activity that humans have invented…’

Frank Auerbach, 2015, who celebrated his 90^th birthday yesterday on the 29^th April. He probably celebrated by painting…

 

oil on canvas, 40 x 50cms, 2021

 I’ve made an awful lot of paintings since the beginning of the year. I’m normally fairly productive given the limits on my time I have in my role as a parent and lecturer, but these last few months have seen me continually painting, almost as if time is running out. Maybe it’s an age thing, maybe it’s the pandemic forcing me to be at home, where my studio is, more, maybe it’s both of these things. Sometimes it seems increasingly all I ever want to do and all I am capable of doing.

oil on canvas, 40 x 50cms, 2021

In the last two months I’ve made a return to looking at motorways and their surrounding landscape, making some paintings based on photographs I took at Spaghetti Junction, a place I’ve avoided in my paintings of motorways, largely because of the extremeness of the scale of its architecture and its notoriety. It seemed almost a cliché of a motorway, a futuristic highway from a J G Ballard novel, whose writing I have never actually read but have been encouraged to by others over the years. I found it all a bit off-putting as this is not where my interests were at the time. 

oil on canvas, 40 x 50cms, 2021

oil on canvas, 50 x 60cms, 2021

Yet despite the vast scale of the architecture of Spaghetti Junction the paintings I have made so far have surprisingly ended up being on a small scale. I have made two larger paintings, but at 80 x 100cms, they are relatively modest. They have taken much longer to make, whereas working on the smaller paintings have enabled me to keep moving rather than working on one painting for longer. It has helped me to keep trying out more images and get more momentum going which is one of the reasons I’ve been able to do so much lately. There is also something about the size of the mark in relation to the image on the smaller scale that excites me as well as the paintings appearing more intimate in relation to their subject matter.    

'Zona', oil on canvas, 100 x 80cms, 2021

However, after making the 3 small ones shared here I made two more, slightly bigger ones, where I felt I was becoming a bit unstuck with my use of colour. They were just too, well, colourful and a bit sweet, as well as spatially very complex, so I have turned my attention to some different work for now which I’ll share in my next post.

Here’s a link to a nice interview with Frank Auerbach in the link below (he makes better colour choices than me):

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/16/frank-auerbach-when-paint-fantastic-time-lots-girls

 

 

Coming Up....

 

'Winter Field', oil on canvas, 70 x 80cms, 2020-Prizewinner!

I’m a prizewinner! A few weeks ago I was informed that I, alongside two others, including my close artist friend Andrew Smith, had had our respected artwork selected as prizewinners in Stourbridge’s General Office Gallery’s Winter Open exhibition. I haven’t won a prize since I won the History Prize in my first year at Secondary School 40 years ago (I’m afraid it was a slow descent for my school career after that...) so I’m really pleased, not least because the exhibition was judged ‘blind’ by three notable judges, artist Jo Naden, Glenn Howells architect, and the photographer/artist John Myers, who is an artist I really admire and whose ideas of the ‘banal and boring’ have influenced some of my own work. And the prize? To take part in a group exhibition at General Office with the other two prizewinners later in the year, which is exciting.

In May I’m also exhibiting at the esteemed Ikon Gallery in Birmingham for the first (and probably last!) time in an exhibition, ‘Ikon For Artists’ aimed at celebrating and supporting artists during the continuing Covid pandemic who are based in Birmingham. All artworks are for sale, and I’ve seen on social media that many of the local artists I know and whose work I like will also be exhibiting, so that’s great to be showing alongside some of these for the first time. I hope I get to meet some of them too but I’m not sure about the Covid restrictions and whether the exhibition will have a private view or not (I suspect not). I’ll be exhibiting a painting I made last year at the start of lockdown, ‘The Green Door’.

'The Green Door', oil on canvas, 120 x 90cms, 2020

I’m also trying to plan a possible two exhibitions with several of the artists that participated in this year’s Sky Arts Landscape Artist of the Year 2021 competition in the heats at West Wycombe Park. It has been agreed that we can exhibit in the National Trust House located in the grounds of the estate, but we are just looking more closely at the logistics of it all, and we are also looking at other venues in the Buckinghamshire area that may be interested in holding an exhibition of our work on the back of the our connection with the TV competition (not show). If this comes off we hope to present the exhibitions in late June/early July. It will be so great to meet the artists I worked alongside in my own heat, but also the other artists from episode 4, without the stress of the competition hanging over us and hopefully get to know them all a bit better. I’m really looking forward to it.

I feel really upbeat about all of these upcoming events. After a terrible year of cancelled exhibitions, isolation, lockdowns etc it’s great to be part of some exciting exhibitions that sees me, and all the other artists, back out in the world again and showing work to expectant audiences (including myself).