Loads of freelance work to grip the body and mind, mostly props and painting and some carnival work. The props are Stymphalian Birds, for a show in Chester about the labours of Hercules. They got that right, I made 8 of them.

 I especially enjoyed doing the paintings. What is it about easels and frames and galleries that throttles the pleasure of painting ?  There’s something playful but purposeful about painting for the theatre. It’s so rewarding because working towards a performance has to be more collaborative, less ego driven. The work ends up less polite and prissy than working for a gallery show.

 Strangely all this activity left room for my heart and guts to think at their own pace. Guts and heart are good at asking the why questions, the questions you tell yourself you haven’t the time to ask. To be honest I’ve felt dissatisfied with business as usual since I came back from Skye and Orkney. As my dear friend Bill Brody said :

“I’m tired of doing art that I’m supposed to be doing”. 

He heads for the backwoods whenever he needs to think. He’s just back from a two week canoe trip in Beaver Creek Alaska. He’s very good at using the rigour of proper travelling because he has the practical stuff sorted, and keeps working whatever happens. The first thing he does is absorb himself into the silence. This allows the questions to appear at their own pace, and then it’s just a matter of waiting for an answer. It’s been the opposite of the backwoods for me - I’ve been in the studio without a break for nearly two months - crowded, sweaty, dusty and anxious. I love all of it. I particularly love working on things people actually want.

 Somehow the pressure of other peoples projects and deadlines means that the deeper bits of me carry on at their own pace without distracting themselves with making ‘Art’.

Art. I really dislike that word. Here we all are, queueing up for the last dance of the hominids. How can making eyeball pleasers be a priority ? How can desperately trying to get some airtime from the chatterati be a sensible job ? The trouble is, I never really got myself to believe that ‘artist’ was a proper job, even though I really wanted to be one. When I was younger (small kids and big mortgage) people who said they were artists either had rich parents or were blokes who talked all the time, drank most if the time and saw their kids intermittently. Or they lied about it and were really teachers. Never felt I belonged there, however much I was drawn to the work.

So I’m liking this theatrical painting. Make the stuff I care about, work fast (it’s later than you think), stick it in front of an audience and don’t blink first. Don’t need to perform, just need to mean it. So now I’m working for a local festival, a bunch of pre Christmas shows (Brighton art fair and Old Fire Engine House gallery in Ely and Open Studios in October).

I’m going to push the colour lithographs, do some more scenic painting and mostly I’m going to follow the stuff that excites me.

Now back at 9 Torrin to dry out the tents, sleeping bags and humans. This has been the most physically difficult bit of the trip.

Quiraing is such a compelling place - I felt most vulnerable and exposed here. The walking is harder and you feel unstable and unsafe. Bill described it as more precarious, like it could all come tumbling down on you at any minute. Glad he told me that now we are safe back in 9 Torrin - at the time I asked him about the big rocks that had clearly fallen onto the trail. ‘What happens if one lets go now?’ He replied ‘It wouldn’t hurt for long’. In his journal he wrote ‘Quiraing is fantastic, a blasted, precarious jumble of unlikely spires set amidst impossibly green sheep pastures on steep, STEEP slopes.’

Where the Cuillins are resistant, embedded plugs of hard granite this place felt altogether more fractured, tortured and twisted. Hard shards of bare rock with slopes covered by scree and big rocks loosened by frost and rain. Everything is toppling over, humans just don’t stay around long enough to see it happening. We were working higher up too, so the wind felt colder and more gusty. This meant I paid too little attention to proper kit and wet feet, stayed still for too long and then wasted the best part of the day trying to warm up in my sleeping bag. Bill sorted me out with a dry pair of woollen socks and a hot water bottle made of his drinking flask. I felt so ashamed, a proper city boy who had gone on holiday by mistake. Bill has been working outside for twenty years and he just keeps working through the weather. He has evolved a very impressive working method that can set up and sustain the beginning of an exhibitable painting just about anywhere.

I am just beginning to get the idea of making an outdoors workspace. Bill lent me his wonderful Thermarest seat so I didn’t get backache. This led directly to my best day in a strange field of broken rocks, by the cave of bones. I’m so excited by using oils outside where the stimuli are so direct and compelling. Bill has a handful of pieces that are not far off from being exhibitable. For me there will need to be some thinking back in the studio, I’m still reeling from the strength of this place.

I’ve never had a life or career strategy apart from getting in over my head just to find out what happened next. This time what happened next is a really important working partnership with Bill and some fully felt records of a proper journey. The real work starts when I carry back the energy, the subtle alloy of certainty and uncertainty, back into the studio.

Just back at 9 Torrin for the evening after six days working above Lock Coruisk. The most amazing camping, between sea Loch Nan Leachd and freshwater Loch Coruisk. Off early tomorrow for another week working in Quiraing NE Skye. 

The weather was magically kind, looks like Hurricane Bill had finally got bored and left us with some high pressure weather. Loch Coruisk is really special. So much to look at, impossible to know where to start. From where we camped we could see 40 seperate mapped features that people had taken the trouble to name. Visually intense. Waterfall sounds. Strange crows that live in the cliffs above. That wonderful electric smell of kelp. Weather that totally dominates your mood and the practical dispositions of your world.

Hard red-grey granite, sometimes sharp sometimes sinuous and scored by glaciers. Clouds that grasp and beckon like fingers. Old, old rocks, marked by fire and ice, the two extreme forces that shape landscape. As Bill said, most mountain ranges that are old are also worn down. These definitely are not, despite being some of the oldest rocks on the surface of our world.

Bill cracked right on, I went rather quiet for a day or two. It was also a challenge to work with oils in the open but I slowly learned to make a workspace on a rock  and to start settling my dancing eyes. But it was so exciting to just be carried by the visual torrent that was unfolding right in front of me. Really exciting to be handling colour in such variable light. My little glass palette turned into an anvil where I was hammering out the grey-reds that make up these extraordinary rocks and the blue greys that mark the weather. And the greens - I used shed loads of prussian blue and lemon yellow. Good enough for Turner (he did a really balletic watercolour of Loch Coruisk) and definitely good enough for me.

 Waiting for the boat back we met two climbers Adrian and Charles, who nonchalantly mentioned they had ‘walked’ a traverse of several peaks, including the Monroe Sgurr Nan Eag and Sgurr A’Choire Bhig. Looked like a lot more than a walk to me, more like tightrope walking (without the rope). It’s amazing how respect and admiration for this landscape can bring total strangers together so quickly. They gave Bill some Avon Skin so Soft - because his Alaskan insect repellent called Deet was being totally ignored by the Skye Midge. Here’s my answer to them inglorious varmints :  dress flamboyantly and rub myself with Tiger Balm :

This midge really impressed Bill, even though mosquitos once took two pints of blood from a drunk passed out on the banks of the Chena River in downtown Fairbanks.

When we got back we visited Elgol school, to show them our work and to find out what it is like to live in a place as beautiful as this all year round. We showed our work, and were both totally bowled over by the fresh curiosity of the kids. I gave thenm some blank pages from my leperello sketchbook and they promised to do some work in it. We ended up doing a long  drawing together, lovely vigourous and colourful marks. The sort of effortlessness that adults really have to work on.  I wish my primary school had been as nice as that.

Sunday hiking with Bill in Quirang NE Skye. Coast all churned and sliced, the track slipping away from a scarp that overhangs the sound of Sound of Raasay. Glimpsing Rona and Wester Ross on the mainland through the weather. Not much drawing but lots of looking and “Oy vey ! will you look at that”. Reassuring to see what a strong impression this place I love is making on Bill, who is used to 40 mile long glaciers and 20,000′ high mountains. There is something happening here, even thought we don’t quite know what it is yet.

Monday, proper hiking and painting with Bill and Susi along the S edge of Loch Brittle. Working on the cut edge of a waterfall, all roar and rumble with more fluidity than fixed things to look at. Similar feeling to a freight train roaring past when you are standing three feet away on the platform. Susi made a beautiful mark study of the big sweep in front of us and then, being a jeweller, went in for a close up study of a sedge clump. This was the first time I saw Bill working out in the open. He was perched on the edge of the biggest drop, pinging up and down and working on a horizontal panorama in rapid brush marks. He somehow has the capacity to claim the whole picture, whereas I chewed away at segments and had a lovely time working the charcoal into the paint and vice-versa.

Tuesday we visited Elgol, SE Skye, on the recommendation of my mate John Dyvig. Elgol is at the end of the road at 135517, overlooking Loch Scavaig. A wild SE severe gale with spindrift flashing over the breakwater, Soay Island looming in and out of the grey wall of cloud and spray. We could barely speak in the open but now have a plan to get a boat into Loch Coruisk as soon as the weather calms down.

Wednesday Last day with Shug and Susi, wisely spent visiting the Tallisker distillery.  Now all packed up and ready to set off tomorrow from on Elgol for up to a week camping around Loch Coruisk We are sailing on Misty Isle with Seumas macKinnon.

Thursday I’ve only just got time to post this before in an hour’s time, and will be off the grid for around a week, will post proper pictures of the place and the work when I get back.Here’s some really links I’ve picked up along this really wonderful journey :I was pointed at an interesting blog of artists who work with water, called Watermarks :We got a really friendly reception from Ian Chard in Broadford Books and Gallery. When Bill went in to buy a piece of plastic to repair his broken pallette.Got a lovely mail from Nigel and Kathy, a couple of kayakers I met in in Orkney. Working the tides and dodging the winds in that magical island.

Four intense days drawing, painting, camping, and dodging gales in Orkney. The most uncompromising and welcoming place I have ever been to.

Working with oils in the open for the first time - though with the rain they sometimes turned into a rich and strange emulsion. But all worked fine, just as Bill Brody said they would. That insight is now in the Lessons Learned archive, in the biggest file which is marked “just get on with it.” Now in Edinburgh with Shug, precious time with my philosophical best friend.

The first proper days work on Orkney was at the Ness Battery, which is just S of Stromness. Part of the defences for the W approaches to Scapa Flow. It’s almost exactly 70 years since the Royal Oak was torpedoed in Scapa flow, she went down with 833 crew. U - 47 was sunk in the Atlantic as well, with no survivors. My neighbour Len Sage worked as a deck gunner on the Murmansk convoys, these gathered in Orkney too, although Len went past rather then stopped here.

Orkney is too big and overpowering to tackle except with the corner of my eye, four days is a crazy amount of time to work in a landscape so hard and deep and demanding. Took me a couple of days to realise there are no trees, they were all taken away by the Atlantic gales. Didn’t feel that ready to tackle hard landscape panoramas or work on canvas (would have got soaked anyway) but did a lot of cloud studies on the second proper day of work at Car Ness. This is NE of Kirkwall.

That was a magic day, entirely because I met this charming Orcadian man on an electric bike. I was all parked up and perplexed and trying to map read my way to the coast without going through a farmers front garden. He first appeared as a speck on the horizon on a very straight road, like in the westerns. After we greeted each other he offered to take me there. He cycles every day, to keep his knees moving through the arthritis, but today he timed his ride perfectly for me. We went together to Car Ness battery and had one of those conversations I shall remember for my entire life. He remembered the explosion at 00hrs16 on 14 October 1939 when the Royal Oak went down. He must have been a child, but still clearly recalls the morning when they looked out and saw all the activity and realised what had happened. He also remembers the Murmansk convoys gathering and setting out in those frail lines. As Susi said it’s one of those times a when a sound recorder would have been so much better than a camera. I hope there is a reminiscence archive for the Orkney people, and I hope his story has been held safely.

I can’t sign off without mentioning the first random magic event, (they only ever happen when you are travelling) which was  stumbling across the totally fabulous  Orkney Wireless Museum.  They were helpful and welcoming and really well informed about the Scapa Flow sites, I couldn’t have got so much done without their help.

A really frustrating day spent sorting out a puncture on the bike when I should have been packing. Cheered up by getting back to a really interesting mail from Bill Brody about foregrounds. He said :

“The far view of any scene is often pretty easy to determine, and being far away does not change much when I move around a bit. The foreground is what changes a lot based on exactly where I stand to paint, so I send a lot of time finding just the right foreground spot for a painting. I look for physical accommodation as well as just the right mix of detail right at my feet. This concern for the foreground meshes with the goal of painting what it is like to be there, immersed in a place. ”

He sent me a shot of his new painting of Coal Creek. He’s just finished being artist in residence there :

 ”The location is maybe 100 yards to the west from the Murie Cabin, also known as the East Fork cabin. I painted standing less than 2 feet from the edge of the East Fork of the Toklat River terminus of Coal Creek looking south toward the glacier headwaters. This cabin is where you are housed during a Denali Artist in Residency. It was built during the construction of the Park road in 1928, I believe, and used by Adolph Murie starting in the late 1930’s to study the Toklat wolf pack, by now the most studied wolf pack in the world. He examined the dynamics of predator/prey relationships and his study determined that wolves were essential to the healthy ecology of the region and were not the cause of the decline in the Dall Sheep population.  Visit http://www.wolfsongalaska.org/wolf_denali_murie.html for some background information on Murie and his studies. Coal Creek runs past the cabin. Coal is found up the creek. There are wolves nearby. Bears visit the cabin at times. The window shutters are studded with big nails with the sharp ends protruding outward a couple of inches to discourage entry. I have seen photographs of bears peering in the windows taken from within by an artist friend Kes Woodward and his wife, Missy.”

We talk about being ‘grounded’ when somebody is at peace with the place they are in. I’m really looking forward to working with Bill, somebody how has a wider vision than most about the kinds of places where you can work. It’s encouraged me to limit my kit to just oils and charcoal, to abandon the idea of doing “preparatory studies” and whatnot, to just go and be and do.

It all started as a collaboration with Bill Brody who works in Fairbanks, Alaska.

We work 4197 miles apart, but share a commitment to putting ourselves on the spot, both feeling you have to be in and of the landscape before you can really see what it looks like. Well, we picked a spot - 57°12′47.92″N 6° 0′39.82″W to be precise. Starting at Torrin, on the Isle of Skye, we are both about to spend 3 weeks together drawing, walking, painting, camping, talking. Three weeks in the shadows of the Cuillins, some of the oldest surface rocks on the planet. On Skye which, like Alaska, watches the sun set over a great ocean.

It’s only five days before I leave for Orkney on the first leg, where I will be working for a week on my own drawing and painting around Scapa Flow and possibly the outer islands if I can get a lift on a boat.

Packed ? Hardly. Ready ? Mostly. Nervous ? Highly. Excited ? Entirely.Bill Brody is also feeling anxious to get started, but he has to get halfway round the world first with everything he might need to work for three weeks in the open air on an island he’s never visited before. But the best work always comes from the strongest commitment. My main strategy is to keep it simple, so I’m only taking two media : charcoal and oils. This stuff has to be light enough to carry around with us but suitable to exhibit once we get it back. We have hopes for a show in Alaska and in London.

More list of packing and pics of last minute preparations to follow.

Just finished the two ‘interactive sketchbooks‘ for this year’s Jerwood Drawing prize. One of them is the drawings I did at Omaha beach in Normandy, the other a collection of cloud studies from Essex and Alaska. I wanted to do more than put a sketchbook in a glass box.

Interactive is a horrible word, and only needed because we all spent too long staring at monitors. We didn’t need that word when we handled books and bits of paper. Sketchbooks are the hardest to share and display, which is a shame because they record the most direct, immediate and committed work I do. I’ve always resented having to display work on paper behind glass, because you lose touch with the work. You lose sight of the work too, particularly of that surface which is so rich to work on and to look at. So, with a lot of help from Melvyn Barker

we made a display that combines a safe place for the sketchbooks and a smaller handling version which people can touch.

 No pictures yet of the final things, waiting for the results of the Jerwood. I’m not holding my breath - had a double rejection from the Threadneedle Prize last week for the Normandy landscape and the Ourselves 7 portrait of Andrew. As my wise friend Claudia Böse said “each rejection nears us success! (80 rejections: 1 winner: equation)”

Another good day with the very wonderful friday group -  drawing in Mersea Island I was drawn to the most changing part of this old landscape, trying to record the clouds as they poured through the sky above. Paradoxical and impossible really, with charcoal - how can a linear media keep up with a subject that no only constantly changes but also has no meaningful edges ? In the end the students said the clouds ‘looked like boulders’ - which is one of those comments you really need to think about.   So in the end I started looking at the crumbling cliffs - layers of beautiful red and yellow earth with a thin crust of life clinging on the top. I found an interesting artist blog, by Vivien Blackburn,  which is collecting cloud and weather studies. So it’s not just me then .. which is a relief. 

Looks like Bill Brody has started something with his blog about foveal vision.It’s really got me thinking because it’s counter-intuitive.  Most of what we call looking actually takes place after we have looked.  

The brain joins together all of those quick glances, those foveal spot-scans into a composite idea of what is there. Forget rectangular frames and bits of paper -  our field of view is broadly circular. Forget trying to make a drawing from a single look or photograph. Also, because foveal sounds like a soya based meat substitute I’m going to call foveal looking spot vision and peripheral looking edge vision.

The edge is much more interesting than the spot. 

I dropped this whole confusing thing into a studio session at Colchester yesterday and the students came up with some really interesting work ! Teaching is truly amazing when you see ideas get up on their own legs because they’ve been invited in by a group of students. I asked them to do a life drawing where they only look with the edge of their eyes. The model moved across their field of view but their spot vision stayed in the same place. The drawings were wonderful. I only realised how difficult it was when I tried to do one of my own - I noted two spots on an easel a metre and a half from the model and marked them on the paper, then kept my spot vision only on them to both look and draw. It’s virtually impossible ! I had to keep wrestling my spot vision away from the model and even more difficult away from the drawing of the model when I looked at the paper. Also it was impossible to respect the rectangle of paper or board, which is why I started drawing on the floor. 

It’s quite good for teachers to be occasionally subjected to their own daft ideas.  

I like the idea of a third kind of looking.  I like the idea of thinking with the edges of our minds and finding treasure. So much more interesting than counting out the coins we already have. 

Peripheries have always drawn me so it’s inevitable I should start drawing them too. I’m sure that’s why I went to Alaska, why Bill and I are going to the Western Isles, and why I want to go to Orkney. Peripheries don’t have to be far away either, I am always moved by the subtle tipping point where my own human made world crumbles and rots back into it’s earthy source. There is also something so poignant about those myriad unhomely places in the corners of the city where we pass by but cannot rest. Places on the edge of human comfort. As a kid I got in to trouble for writing “This is the outside world. Enter at your own risk” on our side gate. Our back fence had hole in it so I could see the ‘allotments’ - little cultivated strips left over from the war where people grew their own food because the submarines stopped us importing it. Somebody out there kept pigs and we had a pig swill bucket outside the kitchen. One day big diggers and lorries turned up and built a strange square concrete place with no windows and a big fence. I found out later it was a Regional Seat of Government, where the selected few would sit out the nuclear winter. Scared the crap out of me even before I knew what it was. That must be where my thing about concrete started. Making this blog is really helping me at the moment because my studio is  full of building materials and I’m not getting any time to work in a sustained way. Scanning in bits from the sketchbook and thinking is a way of keeping in touch. 

Bill Brody said something really interesting about making a landscape painting. He described two kinds of looking : with the edges of our eyes (peripheral vision), and with the centre of our gaze, which is called foveal vision.

I had to look that up too. But it’s self evident to anybody who spends time looking or drawing. The centre of your gaze is sharp and log-jammed with detail while the edges are only interested in big differences of form or light or movement. Centre vision evolved for hunting, edge vision is for detecting predators. I like to use both when I am drawing, screwing up my eyes so my centre vision goes fuzzy. My friend Nigel said something wonderful about assessing a painting when you go into the studio in the morning .. “You sneak up on it and look at it out of the corner of your eye”. Bill Brody was talking about how painting lets you direct the viewer’s gaze by modulating descriptive detail, colour and tonality. This connects with the Italian word caminare, walking. You can be walked through a picture by colour cues - brown = foreground, through green to blue = distance. Can do this with tonality as well.

To me this is exactly what the drawn gesture is, it’s a visual invitation to pay attention. I have the most trouble with the opposite though, with flat areas of tone. They often end up as just that, flat, laying over and obscuring the bones of the drawing. I REALLY want to get back into the studio .. I just need to get all the builders stuff out first :-((

Spring Flyer 2009

There are a couple of shows coming up, both including new work

Essex Summer of Art launch : Hylands House

I’m showing two new panoramic paintings, of Pointe d’Hoc in Normandy and Landguard Fort near Felixstowe along with some engraving and new transfer prints.

These transfer prints are a new thing for me. Sourced from the painting and monoprints and made on crisp feathery Wenzhou paper. 

Dates : Monday 27^th April 2009, 6 – 8pm. The exhibition will run from 3^rd – 31^st May and will be open to the public on Sundays and Mondays.

Location : The Blue Room at Hylands House. Hylands Park, London Road, Chelmsford, Essex, CM2 8WQ 

12PM Colour and Light : Digby Gallery Colchester

12PM - Twelve Printmakers, are showing again at this busy venue in the Mercury Theatre Colchester. Including work by new-ish members Jude Lockie and Jill Desborough. I’ll be showing new boxworks and some transfer prints. 

Dates : There will be PVs on both Saturdays 2^nd and  Sat 9^th May at 11.30 – 1.30 pm. Show closes on Saturday 16^thMay 2009

Location : Digby Gallery Mercury Theatre, Balkerne Gate, CO1 1PT.

Finally I’d really like to stell you about an an exciting collaborative project called Shared Horizons 

I am working on with with Bill Brody, an Alaskan artist I met in Anchorage last year. We are going to work together by Loch Slapin on Skye this September and show the work in the UK and Alaska. For me, the most exciting part is to be sharing the preparation with another artist, and to start a visual dialogue over such a great distance that can develop as the work develops. 

Please email me and check into the blog if you’d like more information or to leave feedback about any of these projects.

Shared Horizons is a new project that I’m developing with a really interesting artist called Bill Brody. We met when I was in Alaska working on the Cook Inlet panorama. He has a completely committed way of working on the landscape. I originally saw his landscape painting in Anchorage Museum, we later met at Stephan Fine Arts where I also saw his printmaking. 

 We are going to work together on the Isle of Skye this autumn, painting and printmaking and hope to show in Alaska and the UK. 

The plan is to start exchanging work now, in preparation for the intensive time on Skye in four months time. We are exchanging ideas and work in progress, and for me that has to start with my sketchbooks :  

These are from my trip to Omaha beach in Normandy, I’ve also just finished two panoramic paintings. One of Pointe d’Hoc in Normandy

 More follows !

I just got the most fabulous email from Susan Pacillo in Anchorage, Alaska. She and Linny Pacillo started a truly inspiring campaign called the parking fairies. I’d mentioned this in a previous blog, and that Linny had sadly died in 2006. There is now a car park in Anchorage that is named for her. 

Susan very firmly informed me that she was still alive and kicking - you could wait a long time to have the chance to use the wonderful Mark Twain quote that “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated”. She’s working on an article about the parking campaign and hopefully will send me a link to it.        

The parking fairies are a wonderful combination of humour, direct action and disrespect for authoritarians. Conclusively proves you shouldn’t judge a state by it’s governor. I felt very welcomed in Alaska, the defiant humour felt very London. Loose concentrations of intelligent, marginalised people always make for the best jokes.