Dreamer

 Dreamer

(Oil on canvas, 12 x 12 in)

[SOLD]

This lovely lady is now on her way to be with a collector in Yorkshire. I know she’ll be in good company.

Redjacket

Redjacket

(acrylic on canvas board, 8x8 in)

An addition to my Major Players series. I'm quite pleased with the way this series is developing, even if rather slowly. I think it's likely to grow over time.

The Botanist

The Botanist

(acrylic on canvas board, 8x8 in)

I often think that when I'm unable to go out as now, due to Coronavirus Lockdown, I turn inwards to my imagination. When I completed the recent Man with Birds, it triggered a renewed interest in figure painting of a certain type. Previous attempts to get the idea up and running always failed, but this latest effort seems to be on the right track. 

Puzzling

Puzzle (work in progress)

Once I'd worked out what I wanted this picture to look like, which took me most of the week, the initial stage of painting has gone remarkably well, I think. Because of over- and re-working, the figure has taken on a degree of awkwardness, so that's what I'll have to try to address later, as well as working on the background.

Club Man

 

Club Man (Oil on board, 4 x 3 ins) I sometimes get a bit irritated at the continued success of local painters who, inspired by Norman Cornish's example, make a name for themselves by painting old men in flat caps, whippets and decrepit terraces with snot-nosed kids playing in the street. Cornish still paints scenes of Spennymoor as if the pits were still operating, but he's now almost 90 and entitled to go on making pictures of how life was when he was young. However, the north east of England really isn't like that any more and what Cornish's pasticheurs are pandering to is a feeling of nostalgia. And as we all know, nostalgia's not what it used to be. When I was tugging on the portfolios of drawings, this little panel fell out. In 2002, I must have felt that if I couldn't beat them I should join them, so I painted this panel to show it could be done. This old gadgie was an echo of how things were when I first started drinking.

Abstract Thought

I rather like abstract paintings. However, when I get myself in front of a canvas, what comes out is never abstract. It starts with a strong abstract composition, but as the work progresses, the end product is never abstract.

I don't know why this should be, but perhaps I'm too much like Leonardo (he said, modestly):

Don’t underestimate this idea of mine, which calls to mind that it would not be too much of an effort to pause sometimes to look into these stains on walls, the ashes from the fire, the clouds, the mud, or other similar places. If these are well contemplated, you will find fantastic inventions that awaken the genius of the painter to new inventions, such as compositions of battles, animals, and men, as well as diverse composition of landscapes, and monstrous things, as devils and the like. ["Treatise on Painting"]

Give me an abstract and I will find something figurative within it. So it is, whenever I start to paint an abstract, I find the figurative elements surging forward. This isn't a great problem really, except that when I'm in a reflective mood and wondering if my work is going the right way, I look around and all I see in galleries is abstract. I recognise this is a kind of tunnel vision produced by a transitory period of low self-esteem, but it does seem at times that all the general public is interested in buying is abstracts.

My friend Mo, in a recent email said:

"... thinking about it, it could all do with what's fashionable at the moment. In all the magazines I've seen recently about interior design and so forth, they've always shown rooms festooned with abstract art - maybe one large piece of work on a wall to make a statement - and you know how everyone follows like sheep - never mind what the quality is like."

The work of hers that has proven most successful in terms of sales has also been "a bit on the abstract side of figurative as well. "

This thought thread was brought on by the comments my post Corner Gallery, Biscuit Factory. Of the pictures that I posted there, the favourite among Commenters seems to be Wooden Sunset, and to my mind, this is the most abstract looking picture in the set (although it's actually a straight representation of the side of a boat).

So what do you think? Is abstraction the most enduring element of Modernism? Are the general public buying more abstracts than figurative and if so, is it all down to what goes with the curtains?

____________________________

A brief aside, with thanks to Casey Klahn for bringing it to my attention:

I never became an abstract painter because I love to draw, I love to represent. I tried to do abstract paintings, and it always seemed to me that I was throwing out a baby with the bath water. [Wolf Kahn]

Across the Wobbly Bridge

Millennium Bridge (Oil on canvas, 16 x 16 ins)

I guess that about does it. Like every picture, there are always touches and tickles that need to be done after a short while (for instance I want to take down the brightness of the St George's crest), but basically I'm done with this. The Prospective Buyer is going to bring his wife into the studio to have a look at it.

I felt like I was on a roll yesterday. I've not felt that way for some time and I think this may, in part, be put down to the pressure of getting things - expected things, done in an expected way - completed on time. One of the inevitable problems of having to earn a crust, I suppose.

Anyway, having put the Wobbly Bridge to bed, I pulled out a little landscape I've been performing surgery on. I made this landscape for a show a couple of years ago and ever since I've been unhappy with it. It showed a grassy foreground with a typically dark ploughed Scottish field beyond, and misty hills disappearing into a foggy sky. The hills and sky didn't convince me at all.

As an experiment, I thought I'd replace them with a sky I'd photographed from the window of Stately Zip Mansion. The initial knocking in was promising and the field, because of the change in surrounding colouration, took on the aspect of water. Yesterday I let myself go with the paint (mixed with Spectrum Matt Spectragel) and had fun producing this:

It needs a bit more work, especially at the point where hills and clouds meet, but I think this one will work out. As my Old Tutor used to say, "Do ten more!"

My last bit of work - more thinking than painting - was to try out a possible rescue of another painting gone out of favour with its creator.

One of the realisations I've come to in the past few weeks is that I have to break out of the topographically-inspired work I've been working away at ...well, more or less since I began painting. It's limiting my ability to show elsewhere. Although I feel the paintings I produce should be appreciated for themselves, I find that the punters want to recognise the place. I don't much care about the place; it's the painting, the composition, how it's painted, the texture etc, that makes it for me.

Following the punters' likes and dislikes has led me into Bad Ways. There are only so many places in NewcastleGateshead that people are interested in as places to be painted and I'm bored with them. I started a series of other places to try to make them of interest to the public, but to be honest, my heart's not in them. So I decided to Cease and Desist.

The one below is one I started and abandoned as part of the Cease & Desist project.. What I'm trying out here is an experiment to see if I might finally get into some of the figure painting I've talked about before. Yes, I know the figure is a cartoon; in fact he's appeared here before shortly after I met him. Doesn't bother me. I recorded him as a cartoon because it was the quickest way I knew to get him down after I'd got home, but also because he was, in himself, pretty much a caricature anyway.

Not only do I have to decide whether to proceed with this next week, but I also have to decide before then on his scale against the background. There are three possibilities:

I'd be interested in your views, even if I reserve the right to ignore them in a cavalier fashion.

Free at last!

Courtesy of the Frootbat and his motor, I delivered my eight pictures to the Gallery on Monday. I can relax. The weight has been lifted from my shoulders.

Tuesday, I sat around the house all day and basked in the warm glow of having nothing that must be done.

Today, of course, I have to think about dealing with the pile of post which accumulated during the paintfest, mowing the lawn and sundry other mundane duties.

So if producing those pictures was such a chore, why'd I do it? And as both Anna and Marja-Leena have suggested, was it sensible to try to create eight pictures from scratch?

A couple of months ago, I went to see the Gallery's Director and showed him a CD of Interesting Work. "Bit dark," and "Anything newer?" and "Nothing like what we sold before?" were his initial reactions. Working on his lack of enthusiasm, I volunteered, if he'd give me a show, to come up with the goods. In other words, a set of urban subjects , like what you sold before, Guv.

Two days later, I got a phone call from the Gallery Manager offering me a "Booth" which could take six to eight of my pictures. "I understand from the Director that you'd be prepared to do a new set of work for this show," she said. My heart sank a little. Not entirely at the prospect of getting new work done, but at the thought of the old work getting older and not getting an airing. After a while, such work starts to look stale and I begin to question whether I might not reasonably paint over it.

Anyway, I agreed to have the work ready for the opening of the Autumn Show in September. The rest you know (assuming you bothered to read the possibly tedious progress of the work's construction).

I work from photographs. Sometimes they're very successful photographs. For instance, I held a show in 1995 in which the entire collection of 15 pictures came from one roll of film shot from the Tyne Bridge on a cold but sunny Sunday in November.

At other times, I have to be a bit more creative with the photographs and computer techniques have been playing an increasing part in that. Before I quit office work, I relied on the good old office photocopier. Now it's computer technology.

My working methods involve cropping, increasing the contrast, collaging (both onscreen and actual paste-up), cranking up the saturation and altering the hue.

And after all of that, I very often make drawings in charcoal, compressed charcoal and coloured Conte, using the printed results of onscreen manipulations as subject matter.

I make the paintings by working from the drawings, the printouts and the photographs, and whatever the painting says to me during the process.

Sometimes this preparatory stage is intensive. Sometimes it happens over a long period, as and when I feel like it. So it was that when I needed subject matter for eight pictures, I already had preparatory studies done for most of them (and two of the eight were, in fact, already complete)

But that doesn't mean it wasn't hard work. I'd rather not have to do it again, though I'm sure I will at some point in the future.

I'm pretty pleased with the results. Two, maybe three, of the pictures are, I think, a good step forward; probably as a result of looking again at the paintings of Andrew Gifford, whose work during his training at Newcastle influenced me quite considerably while I was taking advantage of the OCA course there.

It might be argued that I sold out in agreeing to do specific work for the Gallery, but I don't think this is the case. My main interest is in urban subject matter. I like paintings streets. So it's no hardship to have to concentrate on them again.

And the Autumn Show is a good opportunity. I've been given pride of place, with two other artists, on the invitations. The Opening will bring in, on the evidence of previous Openings, around a thousand punters, many of whom will not come simply for the champagne. Who knows, I might make some money out of this. "Everybody needs money, that's why it's called money!" as Danny De Vito so convincingly put it in David Mamet's Heist.

My figure work is a long-term project, I think, and no doubt will go through innumerable phases before it gets where it's going (if it ever does).

For instance, I was sitting last night doodling on a little panel cut from an old painting. What appeared was this, which I might very well carry through to completion, just for the fun of it.

Jack me into the broadband and pass the stem cell toffees......

Torquil, Oil on board

You can't beat it, can you, a good night of amiable conversation and argument over an enjoyable meal?

Patsy123 is up from London again so we spent the afternoon wandering round the shops in town, just mooching. I bought another ludicrously expensive colour cartridge for my HP710c and Patsy123 found out the carpet she has on order for Tynemouth is gonna take another 4 to 5 weeks. I came off best.

And then it was time for another meal out. Can I afford it? Like hell. Should I stop? Like hell. This time it was an old favourite - for me at least - Paris Texas. It's an old student hangout in St Mary's Place; cheap and cheerful. If you stick to what they do best, like pizza, pasta or vaguely Tex-Mex stuff, you'll do fine. If you push the boat out and opt for something like grilled tuna steak, you'll be making a big mistake (won't you, Buddy K?)

The food was excellent, anyway. In fact I'm tempted to think they've got a new chef - they've definitely got some nice new bistro-style tableware. Must remember, also, to tell Will Barrow that there seems to have been a sufficiently large turnover of staff to maybe make it safe for him to go back again.

As the pretty good house red loosened my tongue, I found I was talking myself out of what Eric Maisel would call a meaning crisis. With some effort on my part, it may be that I should channel my efforts into a slightly different meaning container.

And what meaning container might that be, I hear you ask. Well, no, I don't hear you ask anything of the sort, of course, because you probably haven't the faintest idea what I'm talking about, so I'll ask it for you.

"What meaning container might that be. Mr Zip?"

Why, thank you for asking. I'll tell you. One of the strands running through my thoughts for some time, has been an urge to do some figurative painting. I spent years doing cartoon figures and all the while wanted to do figure paintings. When I finally got to painting, what did I do? Don't worry, these are all rhetorical questions. I began painting townscapes with no figures in them whatsoever.

In the last year or so, perhaps as an expression of my need to make and keep contact with people, figures have started to walk into my pictures. In ones or twos at first; in crowds later on.

But I've been trying to make sense of my attraction to certain kinds of figure painting. It's not a school to which one might attach oneself. The painters are as apparently diverse as Stanley Spencer, Paula Rego, Alan Feltus, Carel Weight, Balthus and Hopper (you'll have heard of him?)

In his foreword to a 1998 exhibition, Jeffrey Carr, the Curator, has this to say:

Embodied Fictions is an exhibition of twelve nationally known realist painters who use the figure to create fictionalized worlds. These paintings demonstrate the power of painterly figuration to embody content. The quality of embodiment relies on the depiction of visual appearances to create fictional worlds, in the way a novel or film can make an invented situation seem "real". This use of the figure is distinct from the way a modernist might use the figure for a purely formal exploration, or the way a postmodernist might use the figure as a cipher, a sign or a decorative symbol to generate content.

I think this, and his even more interesting essay, may be enough to point me in the right direction. "Go for it," said Patsy123, and she's often right.

But she wasn't right, I felt, when we later turned our attention to an argument about the current proposals for human embryo cloning. I'm much too tired to cover the ground of the entire argument - and it was a proper argument, not simply a difference of opinion - but basically I came down on the side of support for stem cell research, broadband connections for nursing homes and colonies on Mars (I think if you're going to have an argument, you should be wide-ranging). I ventured that science, research and technology are the only things which will get us out of the hole we're very likely digging even now. That they may have got us into it in the first place is irrelevant.

Patsy123's arguments tended to be more like reservations about the fallout from technology. Really, she's been reading too much Oryx and Crake. If Margaret Atwood would simply admit she's writing science fiction, I'd have a whole lot more time for her.

I think I played my masterstroke by telling Patsy123 that she was arguing from a position of a glass half-empty, while mine was half-full. She doesn't like to think her glass is half-empty. If I hadn't seen her opposition wilting, I'd have played my trump card (what kind of game requires strokes and cards?):

Anything the Conservative Right Wing Bloody Moral Majority in America are against must be OK.

I rest my case.

And my weary body.

Time Well Spent

I know I must be contravening some Blogger's Charter by not having written anything for a day or so, but things have been hectic. It did occur to me tonight, however, that watching for the umpteenth time Captain Jayneway get her kit off to do battle with those big buzzing viruses on board Voyager, was not a useful way to spend my time. I could instead be blogging like crazy.

On Wednesday morning I realised the calendar in my head didn't agree with the one on the wall. I had to get a painting finished and to the framer's so he could frame it in time for me to collect it on Saturday. The picture was only barely started and quite a complicated composition. To be honest, I didn't think I could finish it in one sitting, but with the help of a lot of Liquin and a makeshift mahl-stick, I got it done by about 4 o'clock.

Which meant I just had time to shower and dress for a private view with CJ at Red Box. Interesting work, though I'm tempted to condemn with faint praise by saying it was "decorative". Maybe I lack the necessary feminist interest in paintings so clearly based on patchwork quilts and torn fabric samples. Would look good and unobtrusive on an office wall. Providing you don't have an aversion to the colour red. Isn't this favourite colour choice for women's art wearing a bit thin now? I think we all get the biological connection.

I always feel a little uncomfortable at Red Box previews. I don't recognise many of the people who attend. Oh, they'll be gallery hangers-on, artist's sycophants, "networkers" and general boozers like all those who go to previews (I do not exclude myself), but they're not the same ones who go to the other previews I attend. And quite often there's an unhealthy gathering of the University Cabal which makes me want to leave even earlier.

However, I can't grumble about the wine which flowed like...well, wine. And set us up nicely for another bottle over some pasta at Zizzi, followed by a drop more at The Bacchus. CJ was unusually unsteady on her feet, but I was fresh as a daisy.

Anyway, Thursday was therefore spent photographing the new picture, rushing to the framer's, dropping off film at the developer's, meeting up with Patsy123 who'd just come back from London, lunch at the Playhouse (which has now covered its tables with the most horrendous 50s style plastic cloths - all big roses and bananas), general shopping and collapsing in front of the TV to watch the quite likeable New Tricks. Followed by another serial killer movie, Blowback, with the unlikely premise that a serial killer is executed in the gas chamber, only to be revived by shady CIA operatives and conditioned to be an assassin for the government. This is swept away in a matter of moments by the serial killer then revealing that he hadn't really been conditioned at all and was out for revenge on those who'd convicted him the first time round. Barmy plot, not too good acting by Mario Van Peebles.

I'd have been better off blogging. You know it makes sense.

And just before posting and going to bed, I can see I have a lot of work to do with this Spell Checker. Doesn't recognise words like "barmy" and wants to substitute "motorcars" for "networkers"!