'...the tyres rushing by in the rain'

 

oil on canvas, 20 x 20cms, 2015

I made these three small paintings over a couple of evenings. I picked up the first small, square canvas after completing the paintings in the last post; keen to keep on working while I had paints out and my head in the right place.  Before I knew it I had completed the three canvasses.  

                                                            oil on canvas, 20 x 20cms, 2015 They seem to work well as a group, but I’m particularly pleased with the final one where everything seemed to fall into place quite quickly after an unpromising start. There is something that has happened with that one that moves me, and definitely does not quite feel of my own making. 

 oil on canvas, 20 x 20cms, 2015

I heard today that I will now be having a solo show with Cupola Gallery in Sheffield between October-November later in the year. It will be at a large café venue in the centre of Sheffield that they develop and manage the exhibition program for. It will be a great opportunity, and they don’t mind what I show. It’s entirely up to me. I’m already thinking some of these lorry paintings should feature.

The Line

These photos show a series of studies I made last week to develop an idea I have for a larger painting. 

 

  The differences in the charcoal drawings, apart from their relative sizes, may seem subtle but are significant and all relate to how the objects fit and relate to the edges of the frame of the picture to create the right sort of tension in the image that I’m seeking. One only has a vague idea of this, and that’s what the drawing helps to work out. I’m still not entirely sure.  

 

The smaller paintings that followed seemed to bring it all much more alive than the drawings, which I found myself having to unhappily muscle through.   

 

  The paintings were a further development. One painted on white, the other on a red ground. They both offer different possibilities. I’m still confused, but that’s ok. I enjoy being confused when it feels like you are in a creative place.

'Shoulder To Shoulder'

 

'Shoulder To Shoulder' oil on canvas, 100 x 150cms, 2014-15

I’ve found it hard to get much done in the studio in January, which has been a source of frustration, but I have repainted this painting, which I originally posted in October, over a few sessions. I felt like there was something too ‘clean’ about it somehow, and so have thrown a lot more paint at it in an attempt to mess around with it and open it up. I applied a lot of the paint with a rag which seemed a good way of painting the stacks of pallets, which is what they are if you weren’t sure, in a more interesting way. I’m a bit happier with it now. 

  It’s the only painting recently I’ve been able to think of a title. It’s called ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ in reference not to the pallets all leaning against each other, stacked high and close, but to something one of the characters said in ‘Pride’, the film last year about the time in the Eighties in which the Gay and Lesbian Movement stood up and raised valuable money and support for the Miner’s Strike. He said about the need for people to stand ‘shoulder to shoulder’ in solidarity against Thatcher and the Tories as their policies wreaked destruction on working class community after working class community across the country. 

 

So, the battered pallets are a metaphor, and nostalgic, for a time when people did stand together and those values of solidarity and collectivism counted. Still, with what has happened in Greece in January, maybe there is still hope; it certainly proves that there is the will, that those values can find a place again…. 

On Any Given Day....

 

It’s New Years Eve and I’m coming to the end of a busy but enjoyable Christmas break spent with my family. I was watching ‘Toy Story 3’ the other night with the kids, and, never having seen it before, was really struck by the level of detail and the accuracy of it’s depictions in the creation of this world within a world of children’s toys and imaginations. I often enjoy occasionally stopping to look around the frequent chaos of our home which is thanks largely to the children’s toys scattered about the place. 

  I love following the trail of colourful plastic and coming across allsorts of weird, often surreal, juxtapositions of different inanimate objects and their unusual colours, forms and sizes. This evening I spent fifteen minutes to take a few photos around the home to demonstrate this, and say that these photographs represent the sort of scenerios which occur, in my experience, on any given day when you have young children with too many toys….There is a project there I tell my students, but they never listen. I can assure you none of these photos were contrived, they were just as I found them

  It’s been another busy year for my painting practice. Although I would have liked to make more work, I now feel pretty primed to launch myself into some exciting new things with a clearer head in 2015, after what feels like quite a period of experimentation. 

  Still, I’ve been in five exhibitions this year, including a fairly large solo one, “Black Highway’ at Nuneaton Museum and Art Gallery in January. I’m currently in a Christmas group show at Cupola Gallery in Sheffield called ‘Delicious’, as well as the West Midlands Open 2014. The experiences I have had so far with Cupola have pleasingly and hopefully seen me taking the first steps towards the presentation of my work into welcome, newer, commercial opportunities, an ambition I wanted to fulfill at the start of the year. Developing this is something I want to continue in 2015, and I know building relationships with these sort of galleries will take a long time, but I have alot more insight into this than I did at the start of the year. 

  I still want to continue with my own artist-led projects though, and the freedom this allows, and am hoping to do more with Indigo Octogan Projects, as well as hopefully participating in another ‘By The Way’ exhibition with Nottingham based group Land Lies Fallow, which we are planning for next December in Birmingham. I also want to do much more with my smaller works on paper and printmaking and get these out to other galleries and perhaps art fairs. And so on and so on....! I'm never short of ideas for the work, just time.

  It’s good to have a plan. It’s even more interesting when things stray from the plan. We’ll see how it goes. Happy New Year!

  (Santa on the stairs sums me up on any given day, and certainly at the end of 2014)

We Used To Think The Motorway Looked Like A River...

I’ve been using the camera on my phone a bit like a sketchbook lately. I love the spontaneity it offers and it’s ease of ability to capture something seen more by chance. I’m finding it a great way of generating ideas as I travel through the landscape.  It seems to take quite a good picture at night, but the imperfections of it and the weird lighting effects it seems to sometime capture interest me too. Here are some recent ones looking down on the M5, and of some factories passed and motorway service stations stopped at, the parked lorries catching my attention. 

 

  The title of this post is adapted from an album title, ‘We Used To Think The Freeway Looked Like A River’, by Richmond Fontaine, which seemed to fit that image. It’s a pretty good record, not great, but the lyrics are really interesting. I recently read ‘The Motel Life’ by Willy Vlautin, the band’s songwriter and lyricist. This was a terrific tale of two brothers trying to escape their shared past. The prose style was incredibly engaging: very spare yet packed with observation and detail. Just up my street, and often very sad and moving at times. I’d really recommend it. Not so the record…

 

Author/songwriter Willy Vlautin, 'The Motel Life' 

In recent months I’ve also loved reading ‘How I Killed Margaret Thatcher’ by Dudley born, Anthony Cartwright. This is his third book after ‘The Afterglow’ and ‘Heartland’ set in the Black Country, and I’ve enjoyed all three. This one tells its story through the eyes of a nine-year old boy, who, as the narrator, bears witness to the devastating policies of Thatcher in the 1980’s on his hometown of Dudley and the surrounding factories, and the impact this has on his own family. It’s a both sad and angry book, and made me feel both sad and angry too. Finishing the book and then stepping back out it made me reflect on the world around me as it is now and see how much has been lost in our communities and society thanks to that woman’s policies.  The current coalition government are doing a devastatingly good job of hammering the last nails in the coffin. 

  Anyway, on a last, and less bitter note, other records I have enjoyed in recent months, include London Grammar’s debut  ‘If You Wait’, from last year, which is a wonderful warm, late-night listen. It’s been a record to get lost to to in the studio.

Tail Whips and Back Flips

 

i-Pad study, local ramp park

It’s half term and I find myself at some of the local ramp parks as my six year old gets rid of some of that energy he’s full of on his stunt scooter and bike again. We go most weekends for a few hours whilst his sister naps in the afternoons, but as he was quick to tell me as I reminded that he had a week off school, ‘Brilliant! That means we can go to the ramps every day!’ At six, he is the only one on the planet.

Anyway, I did this i-pad study there the other day getting colder by the minute. I spend a lot of time there, often with a book, and always with a sketchbook, and have begun to amass quite a few drawings. I have been mulling over whether to develop something further about these cast concrete landscapes. I’m tempted to see if there are any ramp parks illuminated in the evenings to make studies from, as this would appeal to me more with my interest in the nocturnal landscape, now that the evenings are drawing in. 

Painting in my WASPs studio space, Edinburgh 1998

It’s an idea I’ve been mulling over for years the more I think about it and remember: scenes of illuminated parks and football grounds etc. It first came to me when I was lecturing at Sunderland University in 1998. The Fine Art Painting office was five floors up and overlooked a local park. One evening as I was preparing to leave and catch the first of my trains back to my home in Edinburgh I noticed the park below eerily lit up with brilliant floodlights and a small crowd of young guys playing football. Obscuring the view however, was this wonderful screen of silhouetted trees and branches. The combination of black against the artificial light of the park seemed such a good image and really captured my imagination. I consequently made some drawings and over a few months made a rather dismal attempt at a large painting of it back in my Edinburgh studio. I remember it as being my first serious attempt at a landscape painting and trying to move my work somewhere new. It felt exciting with possibility.

 

Jock MacFadyen, 'Mare Street Snooker Hall', oil on canvas, 1996 (?)

 Jock MacFadyen, 'Cambridge Heath', oil, 2004

Half way through making it, I ventured across the city to the Talbot Rice Art Gallery to see a very large exhibition of new Jock MacFadyen paintings. As a student I had enjoyed MacFadyen’s paintings of working class life similar to my own background, peopled by caricatured but always realistic characters set in the urban wastelands, but hadn’t seen any of his paintings for several years now. I was therefore shocked to see these new paintings where the figures had largely disappeared and the artist had foregrounded the buildings and the gritty, blasted urban landscapes. Several of them were also of floodlit parks with gangs of youths playing football at night just like the scene I was attempting to paint just a mile away in Gorgie! I felt gutted and unbelieving (this is all true by the way! I take this stuff pretty seriously!) I walked round the exhibition somewhat dazed, and then under grey Scottish skies staggered down The Mound and through the early evening headlights of Princes Street back to the studio, feeling that I had been totally beaten to it.  I went back and enjoyed the show several times, and reluctantly tried to finish my own rather lame painting.  I didn’t attempt anything serious with landscape again for several years, instead finding a route out of the corner I had found myself in by focusing instead on my portrait work.

Jock MacFadyen, 'Limehouse Basin', oil, 1998(?)

Now, having developed more of a ‘vocabulary’ in landscape painting of my own, sixteen years later, I feel more ready to return to this sort of subject again. If anything I’ve learned is that so often the development of certain ideas is a long, slow, and often unexpected process. You have to be patient. Also, knowing me I also know that I probably still won’t do anything with this idea, as it’s just one of several ongoing things I’m thinking of…

(There are a couple of nice Jock paintings on this blog of scenes at night, but I sadly could not find any examples on the internet of those floodlit football matches I was fed up that he’d done. Sorry.)

(It’s strange to observe the old photograph of the landscape painting that I found out and scanned for this blog and notice how much it looks like one of my present day nocturnal landscapes. I’ve still got it rolled up somewhere. When I have my major retrospective at the Tate it will feature in the first room you enter, ‘Early Beginnings’…! Or maybe not..)

Kids and Painting

oil on canvas, 140 x 70cms, 2014

It’s been a long and tiring couple of months. I don’t think I have quite recovered physically or mentally from the school summer holidays and the looking after of my two children daily, especially my six year old boy, as I too am on holiday from my lecturing job at this time.  From seven in the morning to seven at night I would be continually on the go in parks, zoos, skate ramps, museums and of course at home in the garden, before eventually throwing them in bed, opening a beer and collapsing on the settee after another day’s action. Some children are great at amusing themselves, and my youngest seems happy to do so but not so my son who needs more support with this. And then back to work at college, which I’m glad to say I have slimmed down to three days this year, taking an extra day off to look after my daughter. We were straight into an Ofsted inspection at the start of term, which is always the most stressful time as you get used to new groups and crank up the engines for another year. Only thing is, as you can probably tell I think my engine has been running constantly without much of a break and is in need of a service.  Please don’t get me wrong though, I love the time with the kids and consider myself incredibly lucky to be able to have some good quality time with them.  We have all had lots of fun this summer, as well as the usual ups and downs of parenting. It’s just really tiring is all I’m saying…! I don’t think I’m unique to any other parent.

It has to be said though, that the crazy days out with the kids, has really helped me focus my energies in the studio, where I found myself most evenings, relishing the quiet time to myself.  In this time I’ve found myself working on three new paintings, working more piecemeal, on different parts of a particular painting each time. Admittedly, two of them were nearly completed in single sessions, but then subsequently slowly worked on, a process I have found very satisfying.

This first painting (top) seems to signal the beginning of a break with all the black that has dominated all my recent paintings, and was painted in a much more relaxed way over several weeks. It began with the pink sky over a red ground covering a previously failed painting, and went from there. Although I had a plan for it with a drawing, when I started adding the colour more unexpected things seemed to emerge with the artificial lighting in the scene (it is a transport depot, still at night, and the red rectangle is the back of a lorry cab) suggesting a mood to follow, and I enjoyed trying out different things with the paint application and the different brushes used.  It’s really rough in parts with some things pretty undefined, but having a ‘rightness’ in my mind that I didn’t want to interfere with. I like it.

 oil on canvas, 150 x 90cms, 2014

 This second painting is bigger at five feet tall and is a different version of a painting I attempted a few months ago and shared on the blog. I believe this is a much better realization of what I had in mind, after making some further drawings, which suggested simplifying things and adding more space to the top of the composition. 

 

pastel on paper, 25 x 17cms approx

As well as being a noticeably bolder with the purple motorway column! After an initial long session on this one, I was unsure how to resolve the difficult middle of the painting with the railings overlapping the lorry (yes, these are two lorry cabs again at the same transport depot). Eventually I was inspired to keep things more abstract after chancing across some images on the net of Ad Reinhart’s early abstract paintings, which contain lots of overlapping shapes and forms.  I think this abstraction creates a sense of dislocation in the image that I’m pleased with. My friend, artist Andrew Smith said that both paintings had a sci-fi feel too, with some of the details in the lamps and other forms, which I had also recognized, although this is accidental. It’s a happy accident though, as I’ve also been continuing to talk with artist Sian Stammers about developing the ‘By The Way’ project with a focus on the canals that link the West and East Midlands. In a proposal we have been working on, Sian discussed the idea of a return to the use of canals in a future ‘post-oil’ world, where motorways may lay desolate and empty. It planted a seed of thinking about these images of lorry cabs, of which I’ve now done three, where there is a sense of them being abandoned by the edge of these canals underneath the motorway, in a wider context or meaning such as this world envisaged by Sian.  Andy also thought I should work more on the railings in this one. I think he’s right. He usually is. 

 

'Shoulder To Shoulder', oil on canvas, 90 x 150cms, 2014

This final large painting has a slightly otherworldly quality too, but largely in the ‘reflected’ composition and the sense that the whole image is floating and mobile. It’s an image of a mountain-like collection of wooden palettes in a factory alongside the canal bank. I like the strangeness of the image, and the repetitive pattern made by the structure. I had imagined making something more expressive with this one, but it wasn’t where it wanted to seem to go, so it has ended up like this instead. I had thought it completed, but having since looked at the building-like structures in artist Viera De Silva’s paintings, I think I’m going to work on it further and try and be bolder with pushing the abstraction of the pattern. We'll see...

 

oil on canvas, 100 x 120cms, 2014

I’ve also been continually playing about with this painting too, which I’ve now flipped from a portrait to a landscape format and again, simplified things. This is the starkest, and certainly most abstract, thing I’ve done, and when I took it to this stage I didn’t think for a minute that it was finished. But since then I’ve been living with it around and I’m not so sure. I’m like it as it is just now, but things change. I certainly have no more ideas for it at the moment…As I reflect in this blog I can see how I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting of different kinds in the last few months, and with these recent paintings I feel like I’m beginning to push things on a bit more successfully and with a renewed sense of purpose. It’s hard though isn’t it? Creating stuff. 

 pastel on paper, 25 x 17cms approx

There seem to be a few key words to this blog: abstraction; simplification, experimentation, now that I’ve completed it, which reminds me of my how I talk to my students this last year in summing up our lessons, with an emphasis on promoting English in the classroom. It seems a bit sad really and a reminder how much I’ve had the Ofsted blues in the last year and the horrible pressures at work this has carried…Like so many in the profession, I really feel I’ve begun to lose my motivation and confidence with teaching lately.

This has been an uncharacteristically long blog, but it’s been a while…Kids and painting: that’s all I seem to do these days. Seems pretty good to me..