Staithes IV

 

Staithes IV

(Acrylic on linen panel, 30x30 cm)

I'd planned on doing only three in this series, but on a whim, decided to try at least one more. Then, having started it, I found myself at the stage of thinking "Why did I decide to do that?" but I could see a way through and this is the result.

I’m interested to find that each of my views of Staithes brings out a slightly different approach, while there’s an overall look that unifies them.

Staithes II

 

Staithes II

(Acrylic on linen, 30x30 cm)

Completed in parallel with the previous painting, Staithes I, so again almost a month in the making. Again I’m pleased with the outcome, especially as it doesn’t look like the painting I thought it would be. Always a bonus.

Grey's Monument

Grey's Monument ( oil on canvas, 20 x 20 ins)

I thought it was time I put the finishing touches to this painting. I last worked on it over three years ago, but I got distracted with other projects and enthusiasm for it waned. Ridiculous, really, but that's how the mood takes me sometimes. Had there been a need to finish it, I'd have done so in a very short time - less than an hour.

Anyway, here it is finished after all, one more to add to the collection in the back of the studio.

St James's from Windmill Hills

St James's from Windmill Hills (Oil on canvas, 9 x 12 ins approx.)

It's been a disorganised few days, with only small bits of painting done. All bits that needed doing but which weren't worth posting here. The three pictures I was working on at the Club were brought home last week and all are nearing completion. This one I finished today. The struts on the football stadium were, as I expected, a pain to do, but they're done now and I've made a promise to myself to leave the subject of St James's alone for a long time.

The Barley Mow, Newcastle

The Barley Mow, Newcastle (Oil on canvas, 16 x 16 ins) £300

Conscious of my increasing tendency to stop short of completion, I decided to push on today and get this painting finished. It's now on the wall of the Club's studio, hoping to win the prize in this month's themed competition, "Townscapes".

I realised that had this been a much bigger picture, there'd have been a good deal less detail in it. Not that I think that it would therefore have been a better picture, just a different one. It's an effect of working close to a small painting, I think, that leads to putting in a wealth of incidentals.

Back in the Saddle

Buildings with Tyne Bridge (work in progress)

You'll have gathered from my previous post that the weather was not all it might have been in Mallorca. Four days of rain, in fact. It certainly reduced the time available to do any sketching, so the one sketch already posted is all there is.

I did, however, take a lot of photographs and what I find these days is that on holiday, my eye is constantly looking for something new, some new project to get me excited. The Vaporetto Series came about that way, and this time I think I've identified two unrelated subjects to bring something fresh to my work. I've started to play around with some of the photographs, but I'd rather wait until there's a definite direction showing before I post them here.

Meanwhile, back to the Art Club today. I'd decided to work on a new small painting based on a photograph taken on the same day, and from almost the same position on the Tyne Bridge as this one.

Last night I squared the canvas up and drew out the main structure. I don't always square up the photograph and transfer it, but I wanted to be able to get on with the painting and ensure that all the elements were in the right place. It's a complicated subject and the chances of getting things wrong were high, leading to a lot of scraping out, re-painting and so on. I don't object to doing that, and indeed, it often leads to a much more interesting and complex paint surface, but this is a small canvas and that kind of work can get fiddly.

Anyway, having drawn out the main composition in pencil, I sealed it under a coat of lemon yellow acrylic. Not a colour I would normally use - I'd usually go for burnt sienna or raw umber, or maybe a dark blue or magenta - but that was first to hand and I went with it. Once I got painting at the Club, the underpainting turned out to be a poor choice. It jarred with everything I laid down and by the time I'd reached the end of the first day's painting, I'd begun flicking small brushstrokes over the points of yellow still showing.

Still, I'm pleased with the way it's goimg. Apart from the fact that I've given myself the task of painting the Tyne Bridge again, I'm looking forward to resuming work on this one next week.

Almost Done

High Level Bridge (work in progress) (Private Collection)

Another few hours at the Art Club today with this little picture. There's not a lot more to do to it, just a few chimney pots and a bit touch-up here and there in the background. I was hoping to get this one done in time for the Art Fair and it looks like I'll be successful in that.

If everything I plan to do for the Art Fair goes as well as this, I'll be a happy man, but I already have to make an urgent visit to the dentist tomorrow to replace a filling, so I think it wise not to count my chickens just yet.

Too Much Colour?

The Gate (work in progress)

Because of a plumbing problem at home, I had little time to spend at the Club yesterday, but what time there was allowed me to reconsider this little picture I'd started last time I was there. In the intervening days I'd decided I didn't like it and intended to paint over it. Now that I've got it home again, I'm not so sure. I think I'll give it a little more work and see how it pans out. I suspect that what's troubling me, tonal painter that I am, is the full colour palette. Maybe it's a bit too Albert Irvin for my liking. Much as I like Albert Irvin, I don't think he's really me, or more exactly, that I'll ever really be him.

I'll start by toning down the magenta sky, I think (it's a lot stronger than the photograph suggest).

But I won't be able to start on it again today. I heard by letter that my picture in the People Show sold at the Gala evening last night, and as the show opens to the public today, I'm off to have a look at it with The Architect, who also has a picture in the show.

Later, we're meeting up with his wife, Mrs Sums, who wants me to consider a commission, so she's going to show me what it is she's interested in.

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.