The last of four small paintings that started back in January on Cape Cornwall! It’s a lack of positive productivity that the top slackers would admire!
colour
Finding a Black Box…
When a plane goes down, mercifully rarely, the first thing that happens is a search for the Black Box. Hopefully it tells investigators what happened, and how. So this group of little sketches, doodles, scribbles, or whatever is part of the record of the larger, more carefully considered and constructed works. The Black Box sits somewhere between the Wonky Geometry series and three even smaller boxes of even more provisional pieces.
I enjoy these a lot. First it helps avoid waste – I can’t abide waste – by using papers from projects that failed and using up paint that would otherwise be discarded (not into the watercourse though!). Alongside that it’s an activity that can carry on alongside the reflection, the mulling over, of what to do next on the more substantive works. No time now for idle hands. And finally there’s the freedom to play around – to not be too serious.
As yet I’ve no idea how many will be made, as with the Wonky Geo‘s these come off a large pile of sheets cut to the size in a rotation as my fancy takes me and are numbered on what I consider completion.
Housekeeping & ‘completions’
Do you have as untidy a studio as mine? I only ask because I’ve been trying for quite a while now (the very decent Climate Change weather helped…the studio can be perishing in mid-winter) to do some housekeeping. Tucked away in back a bunch of smaller canvases that, for whatever reason, never got fully resolved. Including these two from back in the day…well five years or so ago. Around the time I was working on a bunch of big canvases (well biggish nowadays) that showed at the Carnival Of Monsters in Beeston, Nottingham in 2014. These had started out as the continuation of the Conversation Pieces that in turn began back in the late noughties but altered tack during the painting process erasing the more biomorphic forms with a renewed interest in formalism (albeit of a cranky kind). I say biggish because at 7 by 5 foot they would have been considered fairly tiddly back in the days I was a student at Birmingham where the legacy of John Walker was writ large – literally so!
But alongside the bigger pieces I made these smaller panels, indeed I made several even smaller still. Getting them out suggested they might have made the cut…excepting that they needed a small adjustment here and there which is exactly what they’ve just been given. Are these new completed works to be dated 2014/19 or is that as pretentious as I’ve always thought it to be when seen about the place..?
Wonkies…
Numbers 57 through 64…been a decent couple of weeks for completions…aiming to finish up a few more to fill out Box Two. Mind that will need me to pick up the resolution rate as I need to get through to ninety! Had been hoping to have two filled by the end of the year…looking a tad ambitious now though you never know?
Truckin’ On…
Trucking’ On…Time passes, and seems to do so with increasing rapidity as one ages. It seems only a few weeks back that it was Christmas and we are rapidly approaching the longest day of the year after which, as my dear old mother was fond of saying, the nights will start drawing in. I often feel that I don’t get much work made in a year but perhaps thats simply because I dither about making pieces (like the one above) that take for ever to get to a point that I’m (more or less) happy with. This is the final outcome of the three banners that were to have gone to Honfleur (see previous posts). Whether or not they may be able to be shown in the return leg exhibition is a moot point as space will likely be at a premium. In the end I titled them after the three major churches of the town of Honfleur that I viewed one morning from the town’s best vantage point, Mont Jolie.
And today I’m even more aware of time passing as its ten years since Esjborn Svensson died, tragically in an accident. E.S.T. were always one of my favourite bands since I first came across them in the early 1990’s and his death was a sad reminder of tempus fugit. All the more so a decade on. Yesterday I played the above discs as I worked but today the maudlin’ might be a tad too much. So let’s just keep truckin’ on…
Procrastination
You know how it is…what with one thing and another pictures can hang around in your studio for ages. Making one’s mind up about what needs to happen next is a dickens of a job and procrastination is second nature to most of us – or at least it is to me. Structures are straightforward enough until you start putting colour about and then it gets really antsy for me. Do I start shifting elements about or reconsider the colour ways? Whats the ground here…and does it need changing or worse…starting over?
Decisions need to be made!
More Wonky Geometry…
Been ‘out of the loop’ for a while…but getting back in it. This is No. 31 of this series that aims to be around ten dozen in total…and there are over 60 of the unfinished ones sitting on the table in front of me right now.
