It's all about the surface, the painting's fractured surface, the myriad textures of surfaces, the light-reflecting surface of matter... the tiny crevices and small fissures, the incidental, the accidental, balancing control with chance, new and yet ancient history, of seismic ground shifts, the earth shivers... tremours, vibrations, eruptions... the surge of the river, at the cliff's edge, a deluge, the crackle and rumble of quakes, the crater of the volcano, ice floes, a ravine, a chasm, a trip into the mind's abyss, the antithesis of a measured, cautious approach, no aesthetic geometry, no visual maps, no colourist's happy vision, a landscape indelibly flawed, it rides on relentless, roughshod, oblivious to your ideals of a painterly perfection.....
corros; corrosive, corroding, caustic, abrasive, abraded...
meld; misted, damp smoke, ice, molten ash, ashen, brittle, dissolved...
marsh; mire, moisture diffused, saturated, sodden ground, damping down all sound...
fyre; char and burn, molten, blackened, all liquefied...
voda; clear water over rocks, glistening, rippled, furrowed, crystallinesalt traces
costa; at the water's edge, soft sand sleeps, then seepage, a slow escape into the sea...
haze; the strange grey dust of the metallic city, visible, invisible, noxious, politely polluted...
rost; the fire and the fury, the gnawing noise of rust...
fenn; of peat, secret life of soil, a layered bed of moss, quietly decomposing...
mist; of vapour, liquorice fields breathe under a frozen lilac sky......Just a reminder that the exhibition of these paintings is still on at Centrepoint in London until January 13, 2009; for visitor info email or visit the Targetfollow website......
lucid, with a camera
A few straightforward photographs, taken over the last couple of days. Sensing a chill, and knowing that snow was forecast, I purposely wrenched myself from the relative comfort of home into the real environment...
the day before the snow came; fresh, crisp, chilled air...
about 3.30pm, as the sun lowered...
a found drawing; the footprints of a bird perfectly match the tracks of a vehicle...
a hedgerow of ferns and grasses...
field stubble....What I find most interesting in this light frosting of snow is how it blurs the boundaries of property, the shape of the land is more pronounced, the tracks and traces of nature and man more evident. Light is more reflected, the simple hedgerow, scrub and stubble of fields reveal the subtle array of natural born colours: russet, soft putty, straw, mustard, copper, dark chocolate, amber, khaki, moss... This has led me to explore more the condition of synesthesia, where the wiring of the senses get slightly crossed, colours are tasted, textures are heard, shapes make noise. Could I, in some small way, be a synesthete or do I just attach symbolic or associated meanings to the appearance of things?Shapes and forms don't necessarily make sounds of course, but my interest in them is nearly always different to their reality; the juxtapositions and contrasts make discordant noises, they pulsate with hidden activity, the fierce bubbling of rust, the loud raspings of metal on metal, the crackle of old wood, the stringy toffee of dried grasses, the liquorice of freshly ploughed soil... or maybe I've read one too many Dulux colour charts....
fifty and rising
I am still committed to completing the personal milestone of one hundred abstract paintings on paper. I have scanned and uploaded fifty so far to my art for sale page on Etsy (a laborious task as I adjust levels and curves on each one to achieve something close to the miniature painting in front of me).
During the scanning process, grouping paintings according to colour; the muted hues of late summer or autumn, the cool blue-green tones of the coast...
This series of small works are simply titled I to C (Roman numerals), a play on I See, a sense of order in an intuitive painting process...Giving work titles is often a tricky task for artists, keeping an open mind about how things appear, what you see is what you get, all responses are valid... my ideas are part of the experiential process, distilled, alchemical, serendipitous, an obsession with the smallest of details in the disintegrating environment, signifiers of time and mortality of all things... the past, present and future, from memory, feeling and experience... i hope the series as a whole conveys the sense of landscape, each unique but related to the next in the sequence.... I have depicted them here framed as a set of three.