a small change on my art for sale page... the studio gallery or little picture shop, a humble means of generating some creative commerce in the digital age, some intended artfulness, a place for the curious to browse or buy, the small shop for art that i quietly oversee and very occasionally promote.if you can spare some change you might be interested to know that these small paintings are now listed in british £££ - although you can opt to pay in whatever currency you choose; worldwide Paypal will do the currency conversion automatically (which is nice)...
LXXIX 2009, abstract stripes painting on paper [click to view more small paintings]a big part of the online shopping experience is waiting for the special parcel to duly arrive, wrapped up in all the anticipation & excitement of receiving a gift that you really wanted...
fjord 2010 [click to view details]to celebrate the small change in my shop, there is free p&p to anywhere in the UK mainland…
[bookmarks, for books, naturally enough]my online art shop is really an extension of my art studio, a selection of small abstracts on paper and even smaller works on canvas - of which, if you are one that has visited this blog before, might know a little about when and how they came about. these are all small, experimental works which are more process-oriented but they relate to (and perhaps even influence) my other paintings...
xciv, 2009 [click to view in my gallery shop]view some of the original chromatids, a series of 100 small paintings on paper that were completed between november 2008 and march 2009. these small works are probably the most collectively colourful series of work i have ever created and yet i never outwardly planned to paint them at all - but i do have an ongoing thing about numbers, patterns and squares. i like squares for their impartiality and objectivity...i usually work with a more subtle or reduced palette of colours on my larger canvases and panels, so this series has been a good exercise to explore colour and texture on this small scale for its own playful & expressive means, and in turn the one hundred paintings later inspired the creation of these distinctive bookmarks - a simple change in format opened up some new ideas to pursue...
[a set of five art bookmarks - in subtle browns, blues and greens, liminal and coastal in palette]
trinidad 2010 [click to view more]ok, art for sale promotion over - i always feel a little uneasy doing this, i don't want to seem too pushy - these are just a few of the things that i have done, things that in their own way make a path to the other art i want to make and do...for now, i have some new exhibitions to focus on (which i hinted at previously) in the year ahead - but there are no pictures-in-progress because... well, it's complicated - stuff happened, i thought a lot about it, what to do next... let's just call this a deliberate episode of photography withdrawal, a creative interlude, a pause in the digital proceedings... purging the senses, a space to think, to write notes or sketch, to doodle and draw, to just make art - just how it used to be... i am always taking a philosophical stance on things......My field of perception is constantly filled with a play of colours, noises and fleeting tactile sensations which I cannot relate precisely to the context of my clearly perceived world, yet which I nevertheless immediately ‘place’ in the world, without ever confusing them with my daydreams.Maurice Merleau-Ponty in The Phenomenology of Perception...Thank you for your continued support of my art.
inside art, out in the garden, again
i took some of these small paintings on paper for a little walk to the end of the garden this week...
to the shaded spot where the rust continues to grow and bloom in many hues of red, orange, brown, violet and grey...
where a light dusting of green mould or algae turns the old reclaimed wood from a dull pallet brown into a more vibrant shade of green...
where everything is quite simple, rustic, earthy, and unrefined in character......i don't have a good tripod for my camera, so i had to stay quite still to take these photographs, keep a steady hand, propped up against the nearby sprawling branches of a large, overgrown orange blossom (syringa) shrub. i got quite cold after a short while and so my good self & the small paintings promptly came back inside to the house again.here are some photographs of some small canvases i have made, now known as the travelling iCons...
bali 2010, 15cm x 15cm, collagraph print on paper on canvas
nepal 2010, 15cm x 15cm, collagraph on paper on canvas
pueblo 2010, 15cm x 15cm, collagraph on paper on canvas...just thought it would be interesting to show them in a different light, a different context...
on art, painting stripes, and wabi sabi
two small abstract(ed) paintings on paper from the 100 paintings on paper experiment (now known informally as the 'chromatids') there are one hundred of these small paintings but i do not think these two paintings have made an appearance here before.
LXIII and XLVII, painting on paper, 15cm x 15cmthese two small paintings can be viewed larger on my art for sale from the studio pagesimple stripes or striations, as it turned out, were the most direct, uncomplicated means of exploring elemental, rustic colours and textures on a very small scale - they also began to be about exploring a quiet narrative within the process, of texture & surface and how simple stripes or colours interacted within the ragged, irregular edge or boundary of the paper - this simple pattern of stripes and striations echoed what i had seen and observed in the rural environment where i live - from barns and sheds, the rustic juxtapositions of colour and texture in weathered, worn surfaces or agricultural structures - all the things which appealed to me visually and aesthetically.these close-up, 'abstract' photographs were taken in early 2008, shortly after i was given a new camera to play with...
down on the farm...recalling again how this experimental series of one hundred paintings first came about (a dull, drizzly grey day in early november 2008) has caused me once more to muse upon the japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi, an appreciation of the understated, the transient, ephemeral or imperfect.for myself, understanding the aesthetic or philosophy of wabi sabi, it seems to first arise within, in a quiet sensing, a feeling, an intuition or an awareness, that momentarily surrenders up the ego in reverence for the humble beauty of the object or scene, that acknowledges the relevance of time, use or location upon it, and that it can be experienced any time or anywhere if one is mindful enough to see it...there is definitely something in wabi sabi that speaks very much about my own artistic inspiration, something that i can trace right back to my mixed media collages, but i am not sure one can faithfully make an artform out of it, for wabi sabi is what it is...in early 2005 i sketched out a rough mindmap about my perception of the local landscape and the rural environment, in which transience, imperfection and the effects of time surfaced as factors or keywords. later, in september 2007, i contemplated where i was headed within the environmental nature of my art, and i was reminded again of things that are overlooked, discarded or rejected, that situations change, that nothing is permanent, or perfect. i had also briefly referred to solitude a couple of months earlier and the relevance of time in the making of my art.i didn't write anything in this journal (blog) for many months, except for the posting of some photographs of a painting i had finished, a painting appropriately entitled shrede (an archaic spelling of 'shred'), implying a slow scraping back or paring down of layers, and what remains, tattered, torn and fragmented.the outward signs of time passing, transience and imperfection, and an inner sense of solitude, eventually led on to a slow meandering, philosophical path eastwards, towards all things quiet, gentle, calm and a little bit zen, one that made me realise that an awareness of situations or things could mean something more than the sum of their parts. it did not need a name, but it offered up some new interpretations......