Prints

 

Earlier this week I was playing with printing out some of my i-pad prints that I intermittently work on.  These particular ones are a series of stark black and white images that I have sometimes shared on this blog that originally started out as possible designs for relief lino prints. They are based on the paintings and drawings and are an attempt to strip things back even further. I really enjoy working within the limits of just the black and white and find it really creative. Some of the best of them have a sort of haiku quality I really like, others, visually, have more of a Frank Miller quality, which I also like. 

 

I have tried to create a couple of lino prints from them, but not with much success. They seemed to lack a certain energy in the cut mark of the lino tool, at least in this artists hands, compared to the much more fluent digital mark that I am able to achieve with the I-Pad. I teach lino printing to students all the while and they create some lovely results, but I have never managed to master a decent print myself in over twenty years of trying.  I’m keen to still persevere though, as I enjoy the physical engagement with the materials, as I do with painting. 

 

Anyway, I had been wanting to print these out on some heavier cartridge paper to see what they would look like and try to gauge a sense of whether they would be good enough to work as digital prints that I could possibly exhibit, or even sell if they were suitably dressed up in a mount. They did look much better when I printed them on the heavier paper, but what really snapped them into life was finding the right scale for the image. After a few attempts at different sizes I printed them at a modest 10 x 15cms and that seemed to fit the images really well. 

I’m pretty excited about it, and am now left wondering what I should do with them: should I frame them? Just mount them up and try to sell them fairly cheaply at exhibitions or different events and venues alongside my paintings? Or I have toyed with the idea of presenting them in a book of some kind. I could of course, do all of these things…

More of the usual about drawing......

These are some drawings I’ve been working on this week. I love drawing and the way it allows you to really explore a subject. For me, the process of making drawings like these, worked on over some time, where things are erased, repositioned, built up, are very different to the paintings I make which are executed quickly. Making these drawings this way allows me to make the paintings that way. These are made from photographs taken, which I’ve now embraced more as a way to generate ideas and record reference material. I acknowledge that very little of the work I have made in the last couple of years could have been made without a camera. 

 

Still, I could never work straight from a photograph to a painting- I need to explore the image using the hand and eye, through mark-making, in an attempt to think about the formal elements more as a way of reaching the essence of the subject or image. I hope that doesn’t sound too fanciful… I’m hoping to develop these drawings into paintings in the next week or so. 

I also still love being directly in front of a subject to make observational drawings, and responding directly to the subject in the moment. This is more akin to how I make my paintings. It is very exciting and I get a real kick out of it (well, you find ‘em where you can!). These are some i-pad paintings I made in this way on a recent holiday to Wales.

  The light can change so quickly in front of your eyes that it is a real chase to capture something and make creative decisions using the digital paint, but the i-pad is a great tool for this. I was thinking today about the possibilities of exploring some of landscape under the M5 in the daytime, moving out of the nocturnes.

I was very touched to receive these groovy cufflinks from an A level Art student, Nilupa, yesterday as a ‘thank you teacher’ gift. It came with a funny card gently poking fun at the language and terminology I use in the classroom when I teach.

 I’m off to a wedding next week which gives me an excuse to wear them. All I need now is a shirt.

 

 

 

The Woods

I found myself with some of my students on what now seems to be an annual excursion to the Lickey Hills Country Park in Worcestershire yesterday afternoon. They are working on a painting project, ‘From Cezanne to Abstract Expressionism’, with me at the moment, so the plan was to make some drawings and take some suitable reference photographs to work with back in the classroom. I asked them to make just five drawings in the two hours we were there, and thought it only right to do the same. I don’t ever really like to set work that I wouldn’t be willing to do myself, so I set off too with my sketchbook and i-pad into the woods too.

It was good to get out of the stifling atmosphere of the college and into the cold, fresh air. Things are difficult at work, and I constantly seem to find myself battling with someone or something at the moment, which feels exhausting.  I'm sick of it. So it was great to sit under the trees drawing and walking through the woods, largely on my own. Some students did join me at one point, which was nice, as despite everything else at work, the students remain inspiring. Doing it for ver kids and all that...

Trying to create five drawings was a challenge. I did two sketchbook drawings and three on the i-pad which I was really enjoying working with yesterday. There are a couple on this post. My right hand felt painful with the cold by the end of it though. I’m not sure if it was circulatory, as my hand was purple, or arthritic, as it also ached a great deal. The pain stayed with me into the evening. 

Ships Out To Sea...

I’ve just returned from a lovely break in South West Wales with my wife, Diane and our son, Isaac (I say ‘break’ in the loosest sense of the word, as holidays with a lively four year old are not exactly relaxing if I’m honest, but still lots of fun on the whole). We found ourselves in a caravan atop a hill overlooking the sea at Little Haven, a really beautiful, unspoilt stretch of coastline with some breathtaking cliffs and long, sandy beaches and wildlife. 

Strangely sitting silently each day and night in the sea were some enormous oil tankers, forever in view and scattered across the horizon. There were up to ten sat there on somedays serving the nearby refinery at Milford Haven, which is located here because of the unusually deep waters so the tankers can get close.  I found them quite ominous looking, and couldn’t help but feel drawn to staring at them. I made several sketches on my i-pad during the week that featured them sitting dumbly, unblinkingly in the dazzling,  sparklng sea. I made these last two one evening, wandering down to a nearby lookout to paint as the sun went down. 

They were both completed very fast in just half an hour, showing just how fast the light changes as the sun went slinking away below the horizon. Each painting contains several different recorded times captured in just the one image, something that you could only really do in painting.

Cold, cold, cold...

It’s been freezing today. It was just the perfect weather to take fifteen students up to the Lickey Hills in Worcestershire, on a drawing trip this morning, which is what I foolishly did. Having gone to a bit of trouble organizing things I was loathe to cancel, and to be honest early this morning, the sun was shining bright and it seemed like it was going to be a nice crisp March day, just right for walking the woods sketchbook and camera in hand.  I couldn’t have been more wrong. When we got there, the milder Birmingham breeze had been replaced by a biting bitterly cold wind up on the higher ground. It was long before everyone beat a hasty retreat to the nearby Visitor Centre café to warm up.

I was really fed up with the students though, as, despite the cold weather, most of them in a typical teenage way had dressed so poorly for the outdoors in flimsy tee shirts and the thinnest of jackets, if they wore a jacket at all, that it made working impossible. I was determined to lead by example and I headed off with my sketchbook and I-pad and made these two studies, the second one finished at home from some drawings I had made. My example failed, and most of them stayed put in the café. I felt they had wasted my time and their own as we headed back onto the minibus, and like the grumpy old man that I felt, I told them so….

Sunday Painting...

i-Pad painting 9/12/2013, Oldbury

I was in the studio painting a large canvas on Sunday evening, the night before going back to work after the festive break.  It occurred to me that since I became a parent two and a half years ago, I create an awful lot of my paintings on a Sunday night. I’ve become the proverbial Sunday painter. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that, but maybe it’s closer to the truth than I’d like to admit sometimes. 

It’s a New Year, and I’m approaching the second year of my Arts Council funding in February. After much thinking about my Scandinavian experience and the work I made there, I’ve decided to just get on and enjoy exploring some of it in some larger canvasses, more excited now about the possibilities it holds to open up some new areas in my practice, than other problems they may hold. On Sunday I worked on a large banded seascape, which felt rather exhilarating. I loved working with a different palette after the recent motorway work, and also to try and fill a painting with a sense of air and light after the dark oppression in the other paintings. I felt like I was by the sea, breathing in the fresh air. I’m not sure if the painting reaches that feeling though, but no matter. I feel like I’m at a point now after much procrastination, where I just want to dive in and see what I can find. It’s so often like that when it comes to my work.

At the same time, I’m also equally committed to getting back out into the ‘edgelands’ and seeing what I can find on my day off, and weaving any work about Scandinavia around this. The motorway paintings have presented to me the idea that a particular place that may contain more personal resonances is of importance to me in regard to working from the landscape, and that when I look more carefully at other landscape artist’s this is obviously the case for most of them too. It seems an important part of the tradition. I’m just always a bit wary of being too conscious of tradition with regard to my own work, as if that may kill something more unselfconscious off for some reason.

John Constable, 'Salisbury Cathedral'

But these things are there to consider: from Constable’s relationship to Suffolk’s Dedham Vale, Graham Sutherland’s to Pembrokeshire, George Shaw and his native Tile Hill in Coventry, Diebenkorn’s Santa Monica and ‘Ocean Park’ abstracts, Hockney’s Yorkshire Wolds, or Alex Katz and Lois Dodd’s Maine or New York. Shaun Morris and West Bromwich doesn’t seem quite the same does it, but George Shaw and Tile Hill is a good example of how an artist can say so much about the seemingly inconsequential and overlooked place. But in a way, I think all the above artists do this: we now see these places through their art.

 Graham Sutherland, 'Fallen Lift Shaft'

George Shaw, 'Present and Correct'

David Hockney, 'Late Autumn'

                                          Richard Diebenkorn,'Yellow Porch'

Lois Dodd, 'Late November Afternoon'

Anyway, on Thursday I found myself once again underneath the M5 in the cold January sunlight, this time near Oldbury, at a spot I’ve had my eye on for a while; craning my neck as I drive over the bridge that crosses the canal beneath to catch a view of the striking reflections. When I got down there I discovered a great spot. The motorway pillars loomed much taller here, and in places were arranged like a dense concrete forest. The sunlight really animated the space with the long cast shadows, and strong tonal contrasts and bouncing light on the pillars themselves. The reflections were also incredible, with their offering of this deep spatial, upside-down illusion, which giddily draws you in. I’m going to fall in one day as I edge nearer and nearer. I just know it.

 I made an i-pad study of the flickering shapes and shadows on the perimeter wall of a large industrial plant that backed on to the canal, which held equal fascination. I also took some photographs and made some drawings to help me consider some compositional ideas. I hope to return there next week to do some further painting on location, but also would like to return in the evening to capture the sodium light from the motorway above reflected in the water.

 Walking out of a dark, low tunnel to experience these science fiction-like structures eerily rising up is not something you come across every day. There are lots of hidden things in the edgelands….