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.
on losing focus and seeing things
I have been playing with a few landscape digital photographs, having not pursued much in the way of any painting or drawing this week...
A few filters applied here and there, playing with digital effects up to the point of image dissolution... i am interested in the notion of blindness or visual impairment and the many classifications and measures of visual acuity... rarely is someone completely blind... they may have an awareness of objects in space, a perception of distance, or a sense of light in determining day or night time... one assumes that the other senses are heightened in compensation - hearing, touch, taste and smell..these images mirror washes of watercolour or sepia ink blots on wet paper, or smoke drawings...
melting...
diffusing...
dissolving...
dispersing...
evaporating...blindness has also become a metaphor for stubborness, weakness, ignorance or indifference, on not wanting to see something: turning a blind eye, having blind faith, going up a blind alley, not listening to a blind word, effing and blinding, it's all so blindingly obvious...I am not just seeing things; i have some ideas...I could, in artspeak, say that in these images i am aiming to subvert or undermine a belief that landscape photography is inherently truthful... but when i really think about it, it's about achieving emotional distance, separation, remoteness, seeking a form of liberation, acceptance, transformative and reflective, of one's own memory to reality... even a memento mori… but it seems too reductive and limiting to intellectualise from a distance; art is inseparable from one's own experiences of life - there are gaps waiting to be filled. these are just my thoughts; here are some from others...Anselm Kiefer:I don't paint to present an image of something. I paint only when I have received an apparition, a shock, when I want to transform something. Something that possesses me, and from which I have to deliver myself. Something I need to transform, to metabolize, and which gives me a reason to paint.
Anselm Kiefer, Heavy Cloud, lead and shellac on photograph, 1985Gerhard Richter:Strange though this may sound, not knowing where one is going, being lost, being a loser, reveals the greatest possible faith and optimism, as against collective security and collective significance. To believe, one must have lost God; to paint, one must have lost art.
Gerhard Richter, overpainted photograph, 1992Andrei Tarkovsky:Any artist in any genre is striving to reflect as deep as possible a person's inner world... [to tell] about the inner duality of a human being, about his contradictory position between spirit and substance, between spiritual ideals and the necessity to exist in this material world.Tarkovsky - Solaris[last scene, solaris]...the local lakes shrouded in mist in midwinter recall Tarkovsky...
from white snow to grey earth
for a few days, i found the transformative power of the bleak, white wilderness both beguiling and oddly unsettling, thinking for a moment (as i observed and sketched) that it could stay this way for a long time, that i must re-adjust my vision and any perception of colour, in preparation for the colourless days ahead.. and the dazzling whiteness seemed similar to the glare of a desert landscape, a neverending space, and yet disorientating in its cool erasure of the usual geography, the familiar blurred, and buried...
the snow had swept up into little scarp-like drifts along some of the high ground...
and a back road meandering between the flat fields slept soundly beneath a clinical white blanket of snow, comforting or suffocating...
i made my small mark within the white landscape, creating a path i would not otherwise make..
and then the true greyness of the landscape emerges, sodden and soiled, and ragged at the edges, but marking a clear road ahead...