A digital collage of some of the things I have been working on lately...
Abstracted dystopian landscapes of environmental disaster and decay on canvas, some line drawings on graph paper that I have scanned, small collages, and some small works on plaster developed from pages in one of my sketchbooks. The line drawings began as very quick sketches of mundane architectural details, which I then scanned onto acetate and overlayed in various ways, successive layers producing structured and yet chaotic imagery that suggests anything from electrical wiring diagrams to maps and building plans, reflecting the fast pace of redevelopment in the landscape ... it's all so busy busy!! Anyhow, my plan is to develop these linear images in printmaking. The small panels (one, bottom right in photo) I have been calling my incidental paintings as they are by-products of the larger canvases, depositories for random daubs of paint, trying out colour mixes...The Harleston & Waveney (HWAT) art trail continues this weekend, full details of the event can be downloaded from here. The Harleston Gallery is also worth a visit for the taster exhibition, if not for the scrumptuous cakes served in the cafe, or to dine at the evening bistro; it's an old Georgian bank building, tastefully renovated...Anyhow, it's off to to the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich very soon to see the Margaret Mellis retrospective exhibition, A Life in Colour. I am looking forward to seeing it as I have discovered that she was producing large driftwood assemblages during the period that I moved to East Anglia and starting working with mixed media collage and assemblage (as I had no money for a printing press), but I knew nothing then about her or her work. Mellis was a contemporary of Ben Nicholson and the St Ives group of artists (but there's no mention of her on Wikipedia), so this recognition of her work is long overdue. She finally settled in Southwold in Suffolk; it is undoubtedly the influence of the coastal detritus that inspires the scavenger in the artist to repeatedly construct something unique from the disregards of others...