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.  

There’s a funny thing. So now both of the granite statues have turned out to be made of cardboard. Say goodbye to Stalins panopticon empire and Henry Ford’s slash and burn capitalism. 

I guess this moment is an opportunity. Hopefully we wont be stupid enough to start listening to the boys with the uniforms with all their talk about renewal and virility. I hope even more that we won’t get took in by the boys with beards either because soon they will soon be telling us it’s all our fault for being bad.

As we do seem to be heading for the brown creek I guess that people will stop buying art as well. No change there, most people I know never did anyway. This ‘crisis of markets’ is good because it gets working artists off the hook. Maybe art and marketing will finally fall out of bed with each other and even better the rest of us wont have to watch then flirting anymore. I no longer feel even slightly that I have to make stuff to please other people or the media.

The trouble is I’m experiencing a somewhat traumatic de leveraging restructure myself in the studio. Have been prevaricating. What prevaricating really means for me is trying to do too much rather than too little. Too many parallel ideas and projects that are started and abandoned before they draw breath. 

 I had a really interesting conversation with my friend Alan about this.

We were thinking about the importance of lines, and linear structure in pictures. We both value the kind of sharpness that comes from a well placed drawn mark that counterbalances the smeared, flowing field made by a brush. Most of what we see is lit by smeared fields of light and dark. Shadows and highlights have no edges, really.  Our bodies are thinly contained liquid marks, bags of water that slosh and sag as much as they stride and pose. That means  brushes are the best kit for recording it all, however much I find them irritatingly fluffy sometimes. But I value incisive looking and drawing so much in others - Giacometti, Moore (Bobby and Henry) Goya, Whistlers London etchings. In the middle of these fluid fields of tone there has to be bones.  That’s what makes Goya’s aquatints such a revelation. There has to be lines. I need those tiny fragile marks to record the fact that I was here and I was looking. Soft and hard, intrusive and receptive. All very I Ching. 

That’s enough writing. I’m going back to the playpen. 

This year’s Colchester and Tendring Open Studios was really well attended - thank you if you came over and thanks to Peter Jones for organising it again this year. I decided to show almost entirely drawing and work in progress. 

Had a really interesting discussions with Jenny and David about the landscape work, the new stuff from Normandy and the older stuff from Alaska and the Thames estuary. 

 This continued by email and David said something about the landscapes that “speak”. This is a really interesting idea. Here’s what I thought about that :

If artists do our job properly then people will respond to what we do, it’s as simple as that. I really dislike the idea that people have to be ‘arty’ to respond to art. People just have to spend the time, pay the attention. They just have to look and feel.

I was really touched that David thought the buildings speak because that was one of my main intentions.  I’m not really interested in the physical appearance of the buildings or landscapes as such, but in their capacity to speak about the people who made and used them. Those coastal defences speak about a whole episode of human history sinking beneath the brambles. In that way all the landscape work is just big, collective portraits ..   

Also had a really interesting discussion with Pam, Dave and Josh  about the portraits. I really like it when people understand the difference between a persons appearance (snapshots, moments in isolation) and their likeness (what stays in our memory about them, the way we recognise them from thousands of others in a crowd).

I really want to get on with Andrew’s portrait but am not quite feeling brave enough to do very little to it. At the moment the underdrawing and the wash has a real presence that could so easily get lost under claggy paint.  

  Finally there’s a really interesting show coming up at the Peppermint SHED. Work by Richard Pinkney and Sarah Muzira. Opening on Sat 18 Oct - for details and to get on the mailing list contact the gallery Peppermint SHED

It’s all gone quiet because it’s hard to look and talk at the same time.  

Once I finished the Cook Inlet panorama I wanted to have it small with new Changeling engravings and specially designed boxes to keep them in. I wanted to get away from glass and frames. Do pictures really have to stand to attention in polite rows behind glass ? 

Developing new work is just like all the other best things in life - scary and exciting at the same time.  Like the rest of the Changelings series these begin in an imagined place, part opera, theatre, fairground and circus. How could I forget the trips to the Kursaal in Southend when I was a kid ? Check out this very wonderful Surreal Southend site if you want to know why. That’s enough talking - here’s some of the maquettes  :  Progress (if any) will be reported as soon as. Finally here’s a link to a wonderful site devoted to Coney Island   which is sadly about to be torn down. I’m planning a trip there to make a Coney Island sketchbook.

I’s all gone quiet over here .. That’s because I’ve been painting. Although it’s mostly quiet when I’m working, I’ve been listening to silly SciFi stories on BBC7 and Charlie Parker and Trane. Looking for all the versions of Cole Porter songs I could find on my pod.  

John Coltrane : Every time we say goodbye  

Annie Lennox : Every time we say goodbye 

 

Enough said, here’s some pictures

At last. Just had the first full day working on the big painting since getting back from Alaska. 

 Been doing lots of paper based studies, enjoying my familiar space and all my stuff where I expect to find it. The number three studio familiar is exactly where you’d expect to find him, this laptop keyboard is the warmest place so obviously that is where he wants to sit

 I’ve been thinking about body white, I had the strong feeling that the plein air study was too lightless to work with  inside lighting. I’m building the final version around body white with a dash of Raw Sienna, which I’m working into and over the drawing in washes and occasional gobs of impasto. I’m also trying to darken without blackening, which is interestingly difficult to do. 

 I’m going to do entirely without carbon black, except the charcoal I draw with, which smudges beautifully into the body white. Might use some Mars Black but mostly will be making broken shades using Cobalt Green/Indian Red and Cerulean Blue/Cad. Orange. Because I’m grinding pigments into water with acrylic binder there is a really interesting bloom where the heavier pigments (Indian Red and Cerulean Blue) clump up and separate out in loose washes. I’m hoping that with layers they will build up to Alaskan type shadows, which are sharp, high and deep. This is because the sun was so high and when the sky was clear my eyes stopped right down, which  makes the shadows really intense. 

Some bits of freelance stuff tomorrow but mostly it’s another day watching paint drying. How cool is that !

Last day working properly before we head off to NY. I’m speechless, which is no bad thing. Here’s todays cloud and wind studies : 

 I’m going to be visiting these sketchbooks for a long time to come.  Also have started getting glimpses of the painting in my peripheral vision, can’t wait to get back to the studio and begin. Also roughing out ideas for some prints to send over to Bill Brody, would really like to set up a joint showing opportunity with him both here and in the UK.

I should have read the slogan on my own website. After a really committed day painting yesterday I felt really uneasy about the work once I brought it in from the bright light to the interior space where it will be shown. The painting was active and strongly marked but the tonalities and colours were flat and muddy.

Not exhibitable.      

I went to bed knowing that but not admitting it, woke up in the wee hours (broad daylight of course) with Messrs E & B Jeebie tapping on my shoulder. Then I realised where the road ahead lay. I’ve been doing a plein air study, not a finished piece of work.  I only got here less than two weeks ago, so how else could it be ? Once I thought about using studio time I felt a lot better, and will also be able to work in parallel on the printmaking I want to show to Bill Brody. It suddenly all felt a lot better. I could honour the plein air study for what it is - the record of how overwhelming this place is.  

Sometimes this city boy can stray too far from his comfort zone.         

So back to the DNA of my working methods. I put away the painting and had another intensive day of  drawing.  I love burnt sticks. Doing studies of the sky elements that shape this landscape. Trying to look at the landscape upside down where the sky is more visually ’solid’ than the land.

That’s better, everything really does start with drawing.      

Yesterday was a day off at Lake Hood seaplane base, where I could have done with my friend Steve and a hat and a veil like the one Catherine Hepburn wore in the African Queen. Everything was flying, including the Alaska state bird - which is a supersize-me mosquito. I didn’t get a photo of any mosquitos but here’s two float planes. The first one, Steve tells me, is the classic Alaska bush plane, a deHavilland Beaver and the other is a fairly rare rotary engined Cessna. I was talking to Nancy tonight, who lived in Sitka and worked as a health nurse in S E Alaska. Her job was to visit remote places, often in planes like that, she recognised the plane immediately.  Rotary engines sound amazing - brash, throaty and strident - like a Ducati once it gets in the zone. 

There was me thinking Olivia deHavilland was a 1940’s movie star. Here’s tonights progress report :  

 Was working on the sky today - a really active, full day trying to paint out the ideas I had about a fluid landscape. Trying to use the motile properties of paint to describe the fluid energy of this place. It was cold -  the wind dumps out of the mountains, through Bear Pass and onto the hillside where I’m working. The task turned into how to paint a cold wind. I had to wear my new mountain bike fingerless gloves and my kayaking thermals. 

There’s more tweaks to be done tomorrow, but the basic build is there. Tomorrow and Wednesday will mostly be working on the tonal balances of the sky because I’m working outside and this will be shown indoors. This landscape has literally blown me away, I feel as if I’ve had to find new marks for this work. Two weeks is just a sliver of time to be here.