Seville Tile Factory

 Seville Tile Factory

(Acrylic on canvas board, 10 x 12 in)

I was fascinated by the Tile Factory in Seville when we went there in 2017. The strange shapes of the bottle kilns with mysterious openings and cantilevered lamps were a delight for someone who revels in the unusual. I was immediately reminded of the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico, a tremendous influence on many of the painters I admire from the period between the Wars.

Here's a Photoshop treatment I did of a photograph taken on the same visit. I think it evokes some of de Chirico strangeness, but despite a couple of attempts I've failed to turn it into a successful painting. I may return to it again.

Malta Sketchbook #5: Tigne Battery - Roofscape

Tigne Battery - Roofscape
(Charcoal and compressed charcoal over two pages of A4 sketchbook)

A rather overcast day, but that lent a sombre aspect to this drawing of the concrete roofs of the Battery, looking out over the countryside. 

I wonder if it brings to your mind, as it does to mine, the eerily vacant townscapes of de Chirico? Or is it a case of fixing on a landscape a predetermined aspect? There's no doubt that, even allowing for the reduced lighting, the drawing has become more about me than the place itself. 

John Ruskin saw this practice of projecting our own moods onto trees, clouds or complete landscapes as misguided and branded it the pathetic fallacy.  His view was very influential but failed to kill it off: witness the work of Nash, Sutherland, Piper and a whole host of other painters down to the present day. 

On the Shelf

I got a package from Bibliophile Books today. I don't often buy from them because of their postage rates which make the purchase of only one book uneconomic. But now and again I find enough to warrant the outlay. This time they had a hardback copy of In Ruins by Christopher Woodward. I'd seen a paperback in Waterstones a while back but it was dogeared and printed on really cheap paper. The hardback is very nice indeed and was only a fiver. The blurb says, inter alia, "This elegant provocative book argues for the values of solitude, mystery and picturesque decay - seeing a ruin not as a pile of stones, but a living expression of human imagination......In Ruins is full of strange delights, exploring the melancholy charm of eternal fragments."

There it is again, see? Melancholy. More on this one later, I'm sure.

The other book I went for is Wieland Schmied's Edward Hopper: Portraits of America. You can never have too many books on Hopper, I always say. The reproductions are good quality, though not of any paintings I haven't seen before. What I was interested in was the text, which, according to the blurb, "shows how, by linking fiction and reality, concealment and revelation, Hopper's images evoke an enigmatic uncertainty, which is both mystifying and fascinating." Interesting parallels are drawn between Hopper and Giorgio de Chirico, and Hopper and Caspar David Friedrich.

If only I had time to read them now. Maybe in a lazy moment in Scotland.