Blank Canvas

The Summer Collection 2016

As it summer time to round up my previous painting work over 2015-16 and start a new set.

This year I have been spending a lot of time concentrating on developing a workable PhD art history/cultural geography proposal. This is now well advanced and should have some concrete news about that by the end of August. Meanwhile the Tracking Time Blog details where that going….

Here two new Summer Paintings

96 Tears – Acrylic on Canvas 18″ x 18″.

Summer – acrylic on canvas 18″ x 18″

Here is a pdf downloadable catalogue for my last year of abstract painting and drawing.

View this document on Scribd

New Paintings March 2016 and David Jones

I painted these three canvases after Spectrum paints very kindly sent me some new tubes of oil paint. Sadly my ground wasn’t suitable and the linseed leaked into the support dis-colouring the painting. I painted over.

However I am re-painting the main and to my mind most successful image above right alongside a new set of abstract paintings and watercolours inspired by the David Jones exhibition at the Djanogly Gallery which I visited last Saturday.

I was always influenced by both his landscapes and drawn lettering.

The new works will hopefully be shown in the autumn in Nottingham venue TBC.

Update September 2016:
These abstracts will be on show at Doctor’s Orders in October 2016

Digital Drawing/Painting experiments

Candy Crush A3 digital drawing 2016

Photoshop Cs3/XP on a 're-purposed' laptop base and Philips square screen. Medion tablet.

I have spent the week both preparing new oil painting surfaces and fitting up my home pc/ laptop and studio old laptop to use tablets. I have not done a lot of digital drawing..even Moogee was mostly scanned drawings but am learning.

Mostly I experimenting with lag (home 64 bit ironically slowest) Windows 10 laptop fastest depending on which tablet/pen I mix up. The nearest to a true drawing experience ironically seems to be laptop and CS3 maybe because of inherent latency in other versions.

I also tried printing out both A4 and A3 images scaled down just to see how looked which interesting. I think if printed on high quality printer at A3 with decent paper could be equivalent of prints.

As for subject matter like paintings I re-investigating notion of code or residual mark-making based on landscape. Filtered through an Arshile Gorky/Paul Klee lens so to speak. I presently reading ( have been reading for two years!) a biography of Gorky (see below). It a little romanticised but does give a good account of his migrant status and position in American society..hence the name change and pretense of being Maxim Gorky’s nephew.

Here three test images . First is a very basic drawn image. Second a stage pre-layers in photoshop and finally the completed image.

I was taken with the way Dan Perfect used digital ‘pre-drawing’ in his joint show with partner Fiona Rae at The Castle (above an image of his) and it somehow combined with my reading about Gorky.

New Oil Paintings – 23 Years On

So after 23 years I open a can of oil paint and start painting. First thought is why did it take so long. Is far nicer to work with than acrylic and whereas I appreciate the quick-drying facility that allows rapid over-painting there something too dry about acrylic.

Early days but have started over-painting a couple of series from last year that failed to convince me or the public. Most interesting thing is I started to work in references to previous drawing research and cartooning in a roundabout way.

Here the drawing from Nottingham Open two years ago it links directly to painting above.

I also connecting that with my early 1980’s decorative and aboriginal art influenced work. I do not feel the pressure of the career break any more and actually feel like this could be a career for possibly the first time ever. I have never been a part-time painter and I shall give it a good go for the next year and see what happens.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/15/arts/design/15patt.html

Pattern and Decoration 1975-1985

New French Painting especially Figuration Libre was also an influence

crossed over with NY Grafitti art…..Haring and Basquait etc….

Old Paint Never Dies – Moon Over The Downs 1993

‘Moon Over The Downs’ oil on canvas 5′ x 5′ un-stretched canvas. 1993

In January 1993 things were pretty much as usual. I was still officially unemployed.

I received a ‘commission’ from my friend Pete Astor who was at that time living in Walthamstow with Sukie Smith. This was £150 for materials to paint a large canvas for their living room. It was a great boost after a bad year and I soon spent the money on oil paints and painted out my dad’s unused garage as a studio which was quite good.

The paintings below came from that brief period before I moved to London to be with Ana Fortun who I met on 3rd March 1993 at a friend’s birthday party. I gave the large barn canvas above to Ana when we parted 7 years later but do not have an image of Pete’s canvas sadly and I am not sure if it survived.

The rest of the paintings were ‘saved’ by Laura Stenhouse, an artist friend, who a year later picked them up to stop them getting damaged in the garage when I moved to Edinburgh. I know the Kew Gardens canvas went to Laura who sadly passed away a few years back. Her husband Bob Lindsay-Smith still has this painting I believe.

Kew Gardens 0il on canvas 24” x 36”

And this from same batch but painted over.. all dated January- March 1993

Red Barn oil on canvas 24″ x 24″ 1993

Old Spectrum Paint – 20 years in a shed…

Old paint never dies….

In 1993 I was back home in Didcot, Oxfordshire and a musician friend Pete Astor who I had done record covers for commissioned a wall hanging.

He gave me a £100 and I said I would put in to materials…it was a friend’s gesture of support as I was on the dole at the time.

I bought the paint tins from Atlantis in London. I painted the canvas for him then…

I met a Spanish lady and we ran off to Edinburgh and the paints were placed in a suitcase in my father’s shed.

In 2013 I was clearing the shed following my parent’s deaths and the sale of their house.

I took the suitcase and this week opened them again for first time worried they would be dried out as had rusted over the years.

As can be seen from the photos the paint is still in perfect condition….I start painting in oil again next week…I been using acrylic for last few years….

Linseed oil smells great 🙂

Like me Spectrum is still going…

http://www.spectrumoil.com/

🙂

Spilt Milk and Firing Blanks..

I was reading a review of my friend Pete Astor’s new album ‘Spilt Milk‘ on Fortuna Pop..sounds great I have to wait until birthday for my vinyl copy. I have the Mr Music 7″ and both covers excellent by artist Matthew Sawyer.

Anyway I digress. In the review the reviewer said Pete had had a Mike Yarwood moment after years of trying out various ‘disguises’ he had returned to Richard Hell/Velvets jangly indie popdom and it suited him. Well as I same age and had my share of ‘guises’ I beginning to feel same about painting and drawing.

Confronted by a wall of blank canvases ( coincidentally the name of this blog 🙂 I return to square one too…

I looked out my old Degree thesis ( yes I still have it and my essays as marked by John A. Walker and Bette Spectorov). Which was on Howard Hodgkin who my biggest influence at Hornsey. It wasn’t a great thesis ..I left it too late to do a good job and it blew my chance of a first :-(.

Here a largish painting in oil on board from 1979 I think I can see there traces of mark-making, Hoyland and John Walker who big at time and Howard Hodgkin in use of colour and form.

I am deliberately starting slow and small this time as last year’s paintings tended in opposite direction. I also going to move away from total abstraction and painting over the ‘1977’ series from last year which just didn’t work.

Second Wind: Showing new paintings at Lady Bay Arts

A new series of paintings under overall title ‘Second Wind’ will be on show at 117 Holme Road, Lady Bay on Saturday 16th and Sunday 17th May 12-6pm.

Lady Bay Arts Website : http://www.ladybayarts.org.uk/

I am at Venue 16 on map.

See map here : LADY BAY MAP PDF

The location is the lovely house of my old friends the Hitchmen. I look forward to welcoming people to the front room which will be 80s themed with music from that era as that what I listening to when painting the pictures :-).

Indeed the series of new abstracts take the Creation Record sleeves art of the mid 1980s as their starting point. Series are then titled 1977, 1985, etc…

Record Sleeve for Creation Records 1985 more here:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/1624419/Creation-Record-Covers

Why call it Second Wind?

Documented experiences of the second wind go back at least 100 years, when it was taken to be a commonly held fact of exercise. The phenomenon has come to be used as a metaphor for continuing on with renewed energy past the point thought to be one’s prime, whether in other sports, careers, or life in general.

1980 – day one – three new canvases and some over-painting.

So thanks to Steven Ingman (another inmate at 3rd Space Studios currently on remission) I started another set of three square canvases. Happy with how turned out.

Also went back to some curious 2′ square canvases from a couple of years back with graffiti type symbols on…didn’t work for me so started over-painting..still in process.

All in all keeping up momentum …maybe some drawing tomorrow until the finger heals……painting with a screwdriver doesn’t work just get red stuff on the floor :-(….

1980 – the contextual background

Thanks to my fellow studio ‘inmate’ Zenon I being provided with plenty of background reading. Today’s tome ‘What is Abstraction’ by Andrew Benjamin (1996). Interesting but very philosophically dense read which really only gets going when he responds to W. J. Mitchell’s attack on Greenburg. Good overview of Greenburg’s near total dominance of the field and some interesting painters at end..David Reed and Jonathan Lasker included which, as it 1996, confirms that I missed at least ten years of abstract painting and theory maybe more.

I also picked up on an excellent short article on the Diebenkorn show at R.A. by Ian McKeever which chimed very well with Benjamin’s observations.

https://www.royalacademy.org.uk/article/ian-mckeever-on-richard-diebenkorn

and finally the Benjamin via Green burg led back to Rosenberg and Jasper Johns.

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