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. 

Haven’t been able to see the volcanoes on the other side of the Cook Inlet : Hayes, Spurr, Redoubt and Illiumna. Something of a disadvantage if you are trying to paint them .. but I have a good feeling about this job. This hard country has been very kind to me so far. Time will tell.  

I went to an amazing event last night - not really night, although it was 1.00am it wasn’t at all dark. It is called Relay for Life - a 24 hour event for the American Cancer society.There were thousands of decorated paper bags lit by candles , each one commemorating a cancer  survivor or a loved one. They are called Luminarias -  my one was for Kate Selway who would have loved this unruly and generous place and two dear friends who keep sailing through the weather with such grace : Eva Newnham and Jude Williams. Small lights out on the big ocean. Nothing like being on the far ocean to remind you how much you love your people. Click on this link if you want to make a donation.     

Like I said, less words and more pictures

Had a good day blocking in the first of the two panoramas I’ve got planned. So good to be slopping the wet stuff around at last. From now on less words and more pictures:  

I also had a really wonderful meeting with Bill Brody last night, his woodcuts are gobsmackingly good. Taut and robust markmaking, really big and on lovely crispy Japanese paper.  He prints them by hand using some kind of home made baren that he made out of elk bone. What else would it be in this amazing country ? I hope we can show and work together soon. We also talked about looking and painting, thinking and drawing and had a really good Thai meal with a couple of his friends, Gwen and Jenny.

They told me about a couple of Anchorage characters Linnie and Susan Pacillo who fought an aggressive campaign to use parking tickets to raise revenue by direct action. They dressed as Parking Fairies, and went round Anchorage topping up people’s meters. How perfect is that ? Try arresting a fairy for giving away money. The ticket thing was discredited and now they have built a car park and named it for Linnie Pacillo. I like the way these people think, reminded me of the time Ed Burman dressed up as father Christmas and started giving children presents direct off the shelves in a big London toy store. But that was a long time ago ..     

Just back from two days kayaking at Humpy Cove, Resurrection Bay, near Seward. For the first time since setting off I felt I was travelling in the right kit at the right speed for this place.

Quarter inch (if that) of plastic skin under me, then there’s the cold dark pacific fingertips that reach in to grip the mountains. Sometimes these fjords are over 2000′ deep. At last I wasn’t going past, I was properly in the landscape. But mostly it’s the COLDNESS of the water that got my attention. I felt afraid of falling in without a wetsuit, calculating just how far away from the shore I would be when my higher brain functions started to shut down. Then I recalled that the tiny part of this place that has ever been discovered  was first reached by people who walked or paddled in boats made of skin and laths. I dearly wished I had their knowledge of weather signs. I know what an incoming front looks like on the other side of the Atlantic, but here : no idea. Apparently south winds are the biters, and on the last day we got a near gale from the NW which trebled our return time through a head sea in a small boat. All of that out of a clear sky. I just found out a kayaker was drowned near us over the weekend. There is nothing picturesque about this place, and nothing quaint or simple about the native people who got here first. 

This place has such a thin covering of human occupation, most of it remains untouched. It has an even thinner weaving of names, descriptions, pictures and history. Such a contrast from the place where I come from where every place is named and recorded many times. Every place name carries the DNA of the invaders, traders and farmers who have worked and reworked the place and left intelligible marks for us to see.    

The people who got here first had no recourse to printed records or other monuments so you can feel their presence but rarely see it. The cultural threads in this landscape are thin and vibrate on the edge of hearing. In England however, history is woven into a heavy blanket that lays over the rock, a rich topsoil of culture that obscures the landscape. We don’t stand on the bridge at Dedham, we see John Constables painting. I lived in London for fifty five years before I realised the River Fleet wasn’t just a line in Shakespeare but also a real river that still flows under the streets, around the last college I taught at in Clerkenwell and on past Fleet Street to Blackfriars Bridge and the Thames.  

I’ve set up a drawing position on the deck of my friends house and have actually started work, which makes me feel a lot better. I’m also meeting a really interesting Alaskan artist called Bill Brody tomorrow in Anchorage. He knows this landscape and goes to great lengths to be in it when he works.  What an amazing journey this is.   

Another first for the city boy who went on holiday by mistake.  I heard munching and stumbling sounds outside my window at 6.30 am. In London that would mean a spaced out clubber sitting on the step, half way through their donor-kebab style breakfast. But this is a different place and there is no front garden. Also the windows have to be completely blacked out here because it only gets slightly dark for about five hours a night. I lifted up the blinds and a moose was about three inches away from the glass. 

 We both looked at each other with a Homer Simpson DOH ! expressions and s/he carried on with breakfast. Was so big she had to kneel down to reach the grass, like she was praying. 

Started work at last. Working up a series of studies of the fluid landscape. Sun, water and air, three out of the four alchemists elements.

On reflection this seems perverse in a landscape so dominated by the presence of such vast scale and weight. As a kid I used to imagine that cloud shapes were really mountains, just outside London. You don’t have to do that here, there are real mountains on every edge of town.  But all this mass is deceptive, and far from static. We are sitting right on the most seismically active area in the N America. This is a subduction zone where one continental land mass slides under another. There are over 23,000 earthquakes a year here, 150 since 4 pm. yesterday afternoon.

The mountains here are as fluid as the sea and the air, if you watch them for long enough. That’s enough words. Here’s the pictures.    

What is is about airports and aeroplanes ? I’m trying to gather myself after a  first ever long haul flight. Two days in the paraffin powered dreamtime : three legs, sleeping in Newark airport, wide awake in Seattle.

There is something about crossing over to airside that means not all of you comes back. Days that were the same as nights in the blur of 24 hour shopping and surveillance. Everywhere that paraffin smell of jet fuel that reminds me unsettlingly of the stove that used to heat our flat in Manor Park and make petal flame shapes dance on the ceiling when I was a kid.     

Maybe it’s also to to with stretching of time, which can’t be stretched so it’s us that get pulled taut  instead. We are here, we wait, we wait more and then we are suddenly there, which is almost exactly like here was.  Most of us are anxious, except the shark suited business people who are all focus but no actual presence, like laser pointers. The only people who are familiar with the airside world are either bored or exploited. They sweep, sanitise toilets, wish a thousand strangers well every day or they check our shoes for explosives.    A really interesting  artist working in Alaska,  Bill Brody has a good word for arriving after a journey : decompression. I’ve been corresponding with him and hope to meet up and see his big panoramic woodcuts in their proper paper form. But most of all I want to stop feeling spaced out and get on with my work.  

I also will be asking him and the friend who I am staying with what in the world can eat the bark off a tree six foot above ground level in the yard outside. Needless to say this city boy that went on holiday by mistake stayed indoors for the first day.   

Abdullah Ibraihim is doing a concert tonight at the Barbican in London. He just said something beautiful on the radio : 

“Once you strike the note there’s nothing more that you can do about it.”     

  Such a helpful thought  when so much of this job is spent  trying to grapple with instransigent stuff that dries too quick,  goes too dark, moves too easily or just doesn’t look like what I thought I wanted. His compositions have such grace and heart, like so many of the pianist composers in Jazz. Breathe in and breathe out, it’s all improvisation. It’s good to get past what I think I want out of making this stuff and try to see what there actually is after a day at work. Sometimes there’s comfort in whatever  marks there are and you are so tired you can’t be arsed to scrape them off. 

So far today all I’ve got is some rather beautiful primed cotton duck, glowing gently as it dries in the studio.   

Finished the last carnival project late last night so now it looks like I might finally be on approaches for the Alaska job. Three days to get my seals in a circle.  Time for last minute decisions and planning (is there any other kind ?) : 

Support : fine cotton duck. I’m planning to pre stretch, prime and the roll up for the journey. This makes showing simpler than paper which needs frames and glass. Will experiment with getting a gesso like surface without making it so brittle it cracks when I roll it up.  

Media : Charcoal. No time for anything clever so back to cave man burnt sticks. I also want to use bodycolour so will put together a tight palette of acrylic based colours. Like the ones for the Orford Bomb Ballistics building panorama or the new Orford 360 panorama  I’ll use paper and sketchbooks for the rapid studies of weather and other changes. Have made some special sketchbooks that take letterbox format paper. Probably with watercolour.   

Off to watch paint dry now.  

Been thinking more about different ways of looking at a landscape, as part of the preparation for the Alaska job. The traditional concerns are about rendering volume and distance. Completely explained in the fabulous  Father Ted Series 2 Part 1 : Hell written by Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan. Ted tries to explain the difference between a real cow and a toy one :

Ted : (Holding a toy cow in front of Dougal) ”Dougal, this cow is small. (points out of the window) Those ones are far away. Small … Far away.”             

 Genius. And everything you ever needed to know about linear perspective. Rendering distance by modulating tones (lighter = far away) and bending contours (converging on the horizon = far away). These are the obvious problems but not the most interesting ones. Let’s see if we can find drawn marks or descriptors for the moving, fluid and unstable bits of the landscape :

• Change (multiple alterations through time)
• Flow (soft through soft or soft around hard)
• Abrasion (hard into soft)

It’s lucky that change, flow and abrasion are also built into the uncertain process of drawing itself,  whether you want them to be or not. 

• Change by erasing and moving a mark but leaving the trace, pentimenti
• Flow by changes in direction and weighting of mark
• Abrasion by attacking the actual drawn surface, giving it a history

I’m rather uncomfortable with this kind of theoretical stuff, but I so often have no idea what I’m doing till I hear myself telling somebody about it. It’s also been partly provoked by a really interesting book about painting that I read and re read just now :  ”What painting is” by James Elkins. A lot of it confused me, which is no bad thing, but it did a wonderful job of trying to talk in the language of paint. I’m trying to ask similar questions here about drawing I suppose. Drawing is the most accurate and sensitive way of recording look-decisions. Often it’s too accurate when the looks aren’t careful and the drawing is going badly. The limitation is that these decisions can only be recorded a a sequence, basically because I can’t think and draw more than one thing at a time. I want to know if I can wire up the drawing process differently - wire it up in parallel instead of in series.  

Numbers can do that. Can a drawing ?