I received an email from another artist and my reply encapsulates the theme of this artist journal entry:Never throw anything away! File away your experiments and don't look at them for a few weeks - with a fresh eye you will find a future use for them. I keep all my colour/texture experiments...We all get "stuck" sometimes. I think I'm stuck too - i keep reverting to horizontals (which is a direct influence of the very flat open landscape here) but also i feel if I add other compositional elements it will become too busy and perhaps too decorative. My latest large work 'mud slide' is so overbearingly depressing to me now since it was created during a bleak period, but if I add to or rework it will lose its metaphorical origin...I recently took a train trip and took some slow exposures out of the window - they nearly all have dark, monochrome, blurred, horizontal bandings!...I have also been out observing and photographing dead or bare trees...their dark, skeletal structures against the sky or horizon...I should be out there drawing but it has been so bitterly cold (we Brits love bemoaning the changeable weather!). A way back into drawing for me was doing enlarged works of sections of very small objects. With the extra space there is the opportunity to experiment more with mark-making and materials - and just enjoy the freedom. I have collected over a hundred pebbles with holes in them but I have yet to draw one of them - maybe I should right now! Henry Moore famously collected flint and old bones churned up in the ploughed fields around his home and then bound them with string - he had these on shelves in his studio...this is what i mean by a 'concrete sketchbook' - a multi-dimensional sketchbook, an ongoing source of inspiration and ideas. I have a wonderful piece of flint which always makes me think of Moore's work.I also have around 15 vaguely heart-shaped potatoes, pebbles and rocks but feel I could never translate them into an artwork - they're merely quirks of nature which I find interesting. There is a famous house in Cambridge called Kettles Yard, in which the old Tate gallery director lived - left untouched since his death - a museum in which the works of Ben Nicholson et al hang alongside the simple arrangement of two feathers in a jar or a circle of beach pebbles on a table - truly inspiring...often these humble little arrangements of objects that we create and live with are also artworks and perhaps cannot be improved upon, drawing or otherwise...The current 'skin' paintings are very slow to progress - I add another layer every few days...I envisage them suspending them in a mid space - affected by ambient or directional light...an experiment which may or may not work - but I have the pressure of a show in June in which people will want to see new work. Spring has been very slow to emerge here and I think it has slowed my work down...and so I must knuckle down and resolve all the ongoing pieces...view "stuck" as an alternative term for review and revise...what is it we are trying to say? I was once asked "Why make art", to which I replied "to answer the question" - it is this question of 'why' we must constantly review (for ourselves), not only the visual outcomes...
outwardly, inwardly
A whole month has passed since I last wrote. I've been working in three different directions which, on reflection, is not helping. It's just been too darn cold to be out in the shed knocking up some curved panels so I've set that particular idea aside. Instead, I'm exploring the idea of semi-transparent, skin-like paintings which could be stretched, hung, suspended in a middle space.I must face facts: I'm obsessed with the hidden history of surfaces, so this has instigated a need to look through, beyond - produce something more obviously layered, more illusory depth, a sense of transience, of passing through. The first image here (a detail) evokes the striations of ploughed fields and the the muddy imprints of traffic. The downside is that I am using stretched plastic which slows the surface drying. At some point they will be released from the backing, after which I can experiment with bending, curving, etc.
One of eight mud-like paintings - actually it's chalk mixed in with acrylic metallic paint on plastic. At some point, I will release it from the polythene backing -the acrylic adding some pliability so it's less brittle...
[close up of another coated 'plastic' painting; this is backlit and around 40cm square]And here are some of the smaller textured panels that I have started...
[these are 23cm square and 5cm deep]
[detail...]
[another close up of textures...]They appear to have evolved into heavily eroded and patinated surfaces which resemble a reality - believable and yet entirely faux. These are the details I would discover (as found paintings or photographs) - in the rot of a wooden fence, a derelict outbuilding, discarded, corroded objects. Having now photographed them, they have ceased to be just images of paintings, but further investigations into surfaces - photography through process validating or making a new artwork, or a documentary realism in a similar manner to my found paintings.I also took some close-up polaroids of them, all of which came out slightly blurred with a blue hue... I will have to scan them soon and see what results...
Frugal measures
A new year should signify new beginnings, keeping resolutions, such as maintaining this online artist journal. It has instead instigated the rough discipline of a period of frugality. I've spent the last few days drawing my thoughts on how to utilise all the oddments of calico, string, wire, wood and board stored in the shed, in response to the many who say I should explore more sculptural or ceramic methods...
I've kept most offcuts of board and they have begun to bow with damp. I was quite taken by their gentle curves laid out in a row, all identical in size. Their contours instigated these drawings.
More contours and curves!
I'm still obsessed with squares, since they present obvious relationships in overall structure, though the previous drawings were an attempt to move towards a new format.
A combination of squares and curves -here I was thinking of ways to extend outwards or around without it becoming three- dimensional, to retain the framing format of the rectangle.I'm currently quite frustrated by the restrictions laid upon me , but I am hoping that some good will come of being ever resourceful. When the chickens came into lay (in the midst of the frost and snow) it seemed that I too was entering a period of embryonic renewal. Holding a freshly laid, still warm egg in my palm, with snow all around, I marvelled at its elegant design and perfect symmetry- all the more beautiful for being such a simple and prosaic object. I've also begun an obsessive interest in composting, and I am not sure if this has had (or will have) any bearing on the development of my work. This year, I've committed myself to overseeing this organic process of turning vegetable garbage into fresh compost for my seedlings and plants, by purchasing a giant hexagonal bin made of recycled plastic - an unashamedly environmental measure. All of which leads me to think - I need to crack on with utilising the remnant materials and in the process of being practical and thrifty, nurture something new.P.s. I've had three works selected for the Byard Art Open, details of exhibition to follow shortly...