[another saltscape]15cm x 15cm, one of 25 works on wood panel for the exhibition salthouse 09... and a small haiku-style poem.a rockscape mouldedvestigal tracesmarks the slippery way out...
[saltscape: detail, showing textures]having had a few days away from this artwork, i finally decided this evening that the 'vertical' has it... as twenty five paintings they could, if hung in a line or in small groupings, be enough work for one exhibition, but as i have to work within a very small space the tight grid arrangement remains...
a couple of weeks back, when going around a student exhibition, i was reminded of an exhibition i had way back, a small solo show in an artsy café, entitled stuck between a rock and a hard place, because there was a work in the student show with the same title.my exhibition (in 2001) consisted of small collages and paintings on wood. i realised then that this small body of work from 1999 to 2001 was neither resolved nor cohesive... it was a transitional time, signalling a move away from the clutter of collage to the flat planes of painting, but at that point i wasn't really sure what direction to take my painting; it was too simplified, too flat, too empty.i've also become a bit stuck with saltscapes too, indecisive over the simplest of things; should they be viewed as glimpses of landscapes, or not? as grid components they seem to fit together better as verticals - vestigial traces of walls, caverns, exposed rocks, silt beds, tidelines, and timelines…anyhow, it's done now, and it's time to fix them to the backing panel...
and finally, some new works in progress (sans salt)… because it's not always what you've done or where you've been, but where you're headed, hard place or not...