Number 8 in the sequence, Oil
I am now working on the ninth painting in the series. This is also a development and continuation of the paintings in the Vodňany sequence, so we now have 15 paintings and still counting.
From the beginning this was a conscious attempt to get to a painterly style, something I have always been very wary of. Criticised by another artist in the 70′s I cynically knocked up something that was “painterly” She was fulsome in her praise, but all I had done was to introduce some easily achieved tricks that made her think she was in touch with the soul of this artist.
In a museum in Scotland many years ago I saw an ordinary army issued footwear with a label “the actual boot worn by a local man at the battle of Omdurman 1898.” Like the exorbitant prices paid for guitars, possibly, played by pop stars the imprimatur of authenticity whiffs of the fag end of religion, and I accept no part of it. Therefor I have always purged “the artists touch” It is a painting you look at not me.
I like the astringency of Poussin’s paintings of the 1630s but as I am also aware of the gently crafted personal drawings that were concurrent with the public output. The drawings show the presence of a rich facture, its absence in the paintings forces us to engage with the meaning and content. In the late landscapes he gives an exquisite surface patina: Nothing tempts me into enquiring into the nature of the man.
My paintings are open to reading as a sequence of events that correspond to the chronology of the painting, but then I play with this, whilst they are built in layers I do not work from deepest/earliest to topmost/most recent. However you can ascertain the joy I take in the creation of each image, and perhaps in the recent paintings done in oil, more than a trace of my discovery of that image.
I have always avoided oil for the twentieth century baggage it came with, perverse in that my chosen medium, acrylic, comes with as much if not more!
In transferring to a different medium I need to understand the new possibilities and limitations, Thus these paintings will become studies in my technical progress as well!
Four and five have intricate surface texture, the latter with those acid colours that are particular to acrylic paint, whilst number six uses a colour range not available to acrylic, it’s painting style somehow akin to early Italian primitives. Seven is an acrylic wearing the clothes of an oil painting. In the vigorous eighth the intension was to use sand for texture in the pale yellow, maybe this idea will return.
