Spring Blog 2019

Time to blog again! The hiatus has been too long. March nearly over, clocks about to change and a two week break from teaching in a fews day time...feeling positive.

Since December 2018 I have been in the studio religiously at least 4 days a week. Climbing, cycling and general outdoor life have been somewhat neglected but I have managed to walk the dog and take photographs on my studio days...thankful for this.

The build up the Borders Art Fair was exciting and although I didn't need to produce all new work I know well that at some point I will need to take my foot off the gas and attend to other things in life...so as the saying goes ..make hay while the sun shines..

My stand at The Borders Art Fair 2019

I spent yesterday doing a serious sweep of my website. I have unpublished many of the pages and changed the headings and groupings of all the pages. You can  take a look at here .

It's not a fancy designer made website, however  all things considered it does now look  less cluttered and clean. 

My work is so varied and so colour filled that I worry terribly that the site looks like a mad sweetie shop....maybe that's me?!

One day when I sell that one big £££ painting I will ditch the templates and get a designer on board! 

Ok so a couple of things on my mind. Painting and what  I call my other work...the experimental, the not fully explored, the technological desert of my experience, the disconnected, all the things I want to do as well as painting! 

Firstly painting....does it really matter that an artist weaves in and out of representation and abstraction? Does it really matter if an artist weaves in and out of expressive mark making to a more metered calmness in their mark making?

I don't know, just putting it out there.

In my most recent paintings I have taken the path of the more metered calmness. The titles for these paintings Couch 1, 2 and 3 are simply a synonym for the word layer. My studio faces towards an elevated view, over the river Ale, a tributary of the Teviot. 

100x100cm Oil on Canvas

I can't see the river unless I wander down the steep slope form our garden but I know its there and listening carefully in winter when its swollen of course you can hear it. The elevated landscape of treelines, sloping hillside and water intrigues me...the shapes in the landscape appear to shift and change with every variation of light.

 One moment everything appears in sharp relief and then in the next moment  shapes can virtually disappear in a shroud of mist. All water dependant of course.

Sketch Book Freedom

In the paintings I am interpreting this landscape from top to bottom as it were, I have no desire to create perspectival space...this is related to my early and continues interest and love of  Cezanne's painting.. He simultaneously flattens out space but also creates a depth through ingenious colour mixing and mark making.

Initial starting point for the Couch Paintings

On another level I have been thinking about the geology of a landscape, remembering school geography lessons and those facinating diagrams of strata...I like thinking about the unseen in a landscape and hope that this new layering process can become more of a focus for my painting. More of this later.

So my other work...I will find a place for it I am sure.I so want to invest more time into it and revisit casting, photography, clay and installation work. Sharing a common theme of enquiry may perhaps hold the key? 

The Bonds that Tie Us
30x30cm Acrylic paint, Giclee print and 10mm Glass
The giclee is under the glass, the painting is mounted on top of the glass

The Bonds that Tie Us  2

Both pieces were in the Visual Art Scotlands' wonderful Alight exhibition earlier this year.

 

 Below some of the photographs that led up to The Bonds that Tie Us work.