'Limbs'

'Limbs', oil on canvas, 150 x 100cms, 2020

The paintings shared in the last post were not actually the first ones I made during the lockdown. That was this one (top) which I had been working towards for some time through various studies. It’s based on photographs I had taken at a corner of Moseley Bog of tangled and cut-up tree limbs stretching back into a space. I have been fascinated by it for ages for some unknown reason. In some ways I consider myself a walking artist in my process: collecting images by camera, sometimes by drawing, often by remembering and going back to places where I have seen things. I have no real goal at the time other than just recording, and then using this material when the time feels right.

Study in charcoal for 'Limbs'

Although I’ve e been working towards this painting for some time, when I finally started on it in the first week or two of the Covid crisis it very much felt like it reflected something of my own slightly fractured psyche after being at home self-isolating. I had been pretty unwell in that first week, displaying many Covid-like symptons, which in retrospect were probably just a heavy case of seasonal flu but with no test available you just never knew and I still don’t. I did feel really lousy for a week though. 

Painting in earlier stages

The finished painting looks pretty heady with a lot of motion, which is a far cry from what I originally intended. I was looking at Matisse’s landscapes just before this and had a vague notion of doing something that possesses something of the air in those paintings but I couldn’t have ended up with something less like that. It just developed into something much more claustrophobic and confusing with lots of conflict between the different forms and the colour which is almost psychedelic. I guess I just can’t paint like Matisse!

In the last year or so I have slowly been experimenting with colour with each new painting when I can. I try and get the light right, which is more difficult, and use colour to create more of a feeling for the subject. After finishing with it for now I put the painting aside thinking there were still things that needed resolving better, particular in the top half, but I had a look at it again a few days ago and thought better of it. There was something about it that spoke to me very much about the making of it and my state of mind that seem to give it an integrity that I thought I might lose if I start fiddling with it. We’ll see….

Locked Down

'Lockdown', oil on canvas, 75 x 50cms, 2020

Dreaming strands of nightmare are sticking to my feet…’

from ‘Morning Way’ by Trader Horne

I don’t write so many blog posts these days, and I’m conscious that I haven’t written any since the lockdown, but in the last few days I’ve felt a bit readier to try and write something about what I have been up to, particularly in the studio of course. In the last few weeks some bigger changes are occurring in my work that I’m excited about that have come about as a response to my direct experience of the last twelve weeks, but I’m not going to write one long rambling blog which can be a bit off putting to any casual readers but a few shorter posts.

'The Green Door', oil on canvas, 120 x 80cms, 2020

These first two paintings in this post, which I’m pleased with for all sorts of reasons, I made at the end of March and are connected to the paintings I have been making in the last 18 months, with their images of windows and doorways, and in that sense evoke very much the feeling of a lockdown as everyone was forced to retreat indoors and the shutters came down. ‘The Green Door’, with its title taken from HG Wells story of the same title is an attempt to make a more direct reference to this story and also the philosophical ideas in the book about the door being a gateway or portal to an alternative or parallel reality. These thoughts come via not through my reading of the actual Wells story but my reading of Mark Fisher’s book ‘The Weird and the Eerie’. Fisher’s book made me think, with its writing about many different cultural, largely literary or filmic and television references on the weird and eerie, how it would be useful to develop the framing and contextualising of my work much more explicitly on these lines than previously, particularly when approaching galleries and seeking funds. 

I think my paintings have clearly had aspects of these ‘weird and eerie’ qualities in them, particularly in some of the ‘uncanniness’ in my recent street paintings, that I have been thinking about for a few years now. Actually the seeds of this idea were planted ever since watching the compelling documentary Charlie Lyne  documentary, ‘Fear Itself’ which explored the nature of human fear through the lens of horror movies in a genuinely unsettling montage documentary form. I discussed this film in a previous blog a few years ago and you can still watch it on BBCiplayer on the link below. I’d really recommend it, not least for all the films you will want to watch after viewing it, which is what I also got from Mark Fisher book:  

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0351g0z