Autumn Update

Having finally brought a painting of a third configuration of the sawn cylinders of silver birch on the shelving unit to some form of resolution this very morning and also managed to photograph both it and its as-yet unrecorded predecessor in the dim late-November day’light’, here then are presented the most recent pair of fruits of the studio practice.

The familiar concerns are in evidence, first and foremost that dialogue between the representation of objects and the painting as object, the material fact of the paint itself as applied to the surface, the communication of the act of looking intently and transcribing the results to be presented in physical form. The objects under contemplation are themselves rich in detail and the challenge becomes to capture something of this individually and collectively as well as a more universal ‘thingness’.

'Silver Birch Still Life #2'

oil and graphite on canvas/16 x 20"/November 2018

[detail]

[detail]

[detail]

[detail]

'Silver Birch Still Life #3'

oil and graphite on canvas/16 x 20"/November 2018

[detail]

[detail]

[detail]

[detail]

Nature Encroaches

Regular readers may recognise that I have long been enamoured of the work of Edmund de Waal and certain of my paintings have reflected the influence of this artist on my own process of thinking and making (some of the ‘white pears’ series make this explicit, for example).

Thus the most recent painting to be brought to a conclusion, (re)presented here, can be said to be haunted by a de Waalian spirit. Another still life, it yet incorporates a significant element from subject matter explored in what essentially constitutes my alternative painting practice, i.e. the world of objects and forms in spaces beyond the domestic realm, in the form of a collection of cylinders of silver birch, between about 12 – 18cm in height, sawn from a length of discarded trunk found in the woods close to home. Such ‘white’ cylindrical objects pay a certain homage to de Waal’s familiar white porcelain pots and are arranged within a shelving unit that in effect resembles the vitrines in which he exhibits such collections of handmade objects.

That’s the background, anyway. What follows is the habitual process of ‘active contemplation’, first through a pencil drawing and subsequently, with slight compositional modifications in the interest of achieving a more harmonious visual balance (the sketch made obvious what wasn’t working that hadn’t occurred to the eye), in oil paint on canvas.

Silver birch still life compositional sketch

graphite on paper/30 x 21cm/30th Sept. 2018

The usual rules apply, of the communication of the physical nature of the objects and ‘tactile’ space and the making of the painting though the materiality of the medium, paint as paint and the painting itself as a discrete object before it resolves itself into a representation of the observed world. Far from being white, of course, the cylinders of silver birch each display shared and their own particular characteristics in terms of subtle earthy colouration (greens, ochres, siennas, umbers), as distinct from the purity of de Waal’s white porcelain objects, and light and shadow describes and differentiates the form of the shelving unit on and in which they stand, but it is to be hoped something of a dialogue is at least suggested with the influential source. Furthermore, by introducing such barely-modified natural objects into the realm of the still life, a dialogue is opened-up between the two genres of painting that effectively constitute my practice and continuing areas of exploration, the woodland, albeit mediated, encroaches into the domestic environment, outside meets inside.

‘Silver Birch Still Life’

oil and graphite on canvas/40″ x 30″ (101cm x 76cm)/October 2018

[detail]

[detail]

[detail]

[detail]

[detail]

[detail]

[detail]

Enmeshed Again...

In the zone after last weekend’s painting session, this Saturday and Sunday I continued the exploration of the subject/objects with an active contemplation of a second example of the recently-acquired pears in foam-mesh protective sleeves. On this occasion, a twist of the inner lining of tissue paper can be observed peeping up through the top aperture.

'Pear in a Jacket #2'

oil on canvas/35 x 25cm/22-23 September 2018

[detail]

Autumnal Object

Having brought the summer project to a point not necessarily of conclusion but rather a pause for consideration of how and where it might develop, thoughts (re)turned to one of those subjects that just keeps on recurring.

Pears as objects have been a staple of my drawing and painting practice for over twenty years, since, in fact, I was a second-year Fine Art undergraduate at university. More recently, at various points during the last few years, I’ve been representing them in altered form, ultimately whitewashed and placed within white spaces, exploring their form in terms of tone rather than colour. Further back, early in 2006, coincidentally shortly after I’d launched this blog, I discovered in a local greengrocers what were termed Chinese ‘Ya’ pears which came double-wrapped in firstly white tissue paper and then, as an outer protective coat, in ‘jackets’ of foam mesh cylindrical sleeves which objects imbue the pears with a certain ‘otherness’ one might say.

Blogged, excitedly, at the time here, these jacketed pears have remained somewhere in mind as a vague possibility to be pursued creatively. Five years or so ago, during a weekend in London, a visit to a supermarket in Chinatown resulted in the discovery and purchase of a selection of such objects, a pair of which were explored in but a single watercolour sketch before, for whatever reason, I concentrated my attentions upon the undressed fruit whilst it remained fresh and firm in a subsequent series of sketches.

Remaining dormant again since, I recently felt the aesthetic pull of the foam jackets and searched the studio for what I imagined were the stash I’d kept for such an occasion, alas and frustratingly to discover that they were nowhere to be found when required to respond to the spark of inspiration. A trip to Liverpool last week – primarily to collect a couple of unsold paintings that had been exhibited during the course of the Liverpool Art Fair 2018 (which it was remiss of me to fail to blog, following on from a similar failure to mention other of my work’s almost-concurrent appearance in this year’s North Wales Open at Theatr Clwyd) – afforded the opportunity to locate and purchase a small selection of  the jacketed pears and, after a couple of painting sessions, on Sunday and to resolve on Monday, the first visual evidence of a single example of this find is (re)presented below – the very first oil painting of an object of long-harboured desire. The familiar environment of white horizontal and vertical planes is evident, with the object suggested as existing within as subtly as possible.

'Pear in a Jacket'

oil on canvas/35 x 25cm/16-17 September 2018

[detail]

Summer Update

When not sat a desktop PC at work (which commitment coincides with the term-time of the typical UK academic year), I tend not to have any great desire to log in and use a computer, thus blogging about matters cultural and one’s creative practice (as distinct from Instagramming on a mobile device and, of course, actually pursuing one's creative practice) tends to take a back seat, as has been the case since late June.

However, the painting produced thus far over the ‘vacation’ has reached a point where it sort-of demands to be blogged in order to maintain that particular aspect of the process of creative practice and to maintain a currency of presence in cyberspace.

To this end, I now (re)present the seven examples of a body of paintings that have been developed over the course of the last couple of months, which take advantage of the seasonal availability of greater and brighter amounts of natural daylight in which to produce ‘white paintings’ (other project ideas and further developments of bodies of work in progress have accordingly been placed on the back burner until the autumn).

The objects represented are a selection of objects, vessels, moulded in air-drying clay from existing vessels, and display certain wonky characteristics such as finger and thumb marks and imperfect forms resulting from this process of hand-making which seem to coincide with the Japanese aesthetic of ‘wabi-sabi’, hence the titles of the works.

The vessels are composed in subtly changing configurations of relationships in the manner of most artists who work within the genre of still life and are painted in a manner that aims to communicate something of the nature of the fluctuations of natural light as it describes objects in space and the surfaces upon and against which they are arranged.

‘Wabi-sabi Vessels #1’

oil on canvas/16″ x 20″/August 2018

‘Wabi-sabi Vessels #2’

oil on canvas/16″ x 20″/August 2018

‘Wabi-sabi Vessels #3’

oil on canvas/16″ x 20″/August 2018

‘Wabi-sabi Vessels #4'

oil on canvas/16″ x 20″/August 2018

‘Wabi-sabi Vessels #5’

oil on canvas/16″ x 20″/August 2018

‘Wabi-sabi Vessels #6’

oil on canvas/16″ x 20″/August 2018

‘Wabi-sabi Vessels #7’

oil on canvas/16″ x 20″/August 2018

Teenage Armchair Fandom (Subbuteo-style)

Continuing with the Half Man Half Biscuit-inflected 'Subbuteo' -themed series of still life paintings, this latest composition - essentially a study of a slight reduction in scale of the represented objects exploring the potential of a larger, more complex proposition - references the title and subject of the song 'I Was a Teenage Armchair Honved Fan' and thus features our miniature heroes sporting the colours of Honved on the left, in the red and black strip, and their Budapest neighbours and rivals - to whom I became attracted and attached as a pre-teen and have favoured since - Ferencváros in the green and white to the right. I've blogged on the subject of this very teenage armchair fandom as it relates to European clubs teams previously, at some length and in some detail, but this seems to be the first time I've made such an allusion in paint.

'Teenage Armchair Fandom (Subbuteo Budapest derby)'

oil on canvas/25cm x 35cm/June 2018

The pair of miniature figures are here represented as being placed in their cutout slots in the cardboard box of the type in which complete teams of players were/are presented for sale or otherwise in the boxed sets of the Subbuteo game, as will be obvious to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with such. It's noticeable that the plastic bases reflect more highlights in this state than being placed on a horizontal surface as previous examples have been, which helps give a bit more painterly 'zip' to proceedings.

An Alternative Christmas 'Want'?

Following-on from the previous post, the latest painting on and off the easel mines the same Half Man Half Biscuit-inspired subject-matter a little more deeply and quite possibly obscurely, this time depicting a vintage Subbuteo football (soccer) player figure sporting something of an Ujpest Dozsa 'away' kit.

'Subbuteo Footballer #6 (Ujpest Dozsa 'Away')

oil on canvas/35cm x 25cm/June 2018

Christmas 'Wants'

Continuing with the current series of small still life paintings, the latest pair (as they’ve become, related) again feature vintage ‘heavyweight’ Subbuteo football player figures (circa 1960s-70s), empirically observed as objects, but here sporting invented colours, the first inspired by the title and lyrics of the legendary and much-beloved in this parish  Half Man Half Biscuit‘s early song ‘All I Want For Christmas is a Dukla Prague Away Kit’, thus being an idiosyncratic representation of, based upon what research reveals to be pretty much established facts, with a nod to period generalities of Subbuteo style.

'Subbuteo Footballer #4 (Dukla Prague)

oil on canvas/40cm x 30cm/May 2018

The matter was by no means laid to rest upon the resolution of this painting (as I assumed it would be), however, as a particular research find served to rock the concept to its very foundation, with Nigel Blackwell‘s revelation here that it was his initial intention to lyrically reference not Dukla Prague but another East European football club – indeed, another Hungarian one to accompany the also-legendary Honved, of whom he wrote and sang of being ‘a teenage armchair fan’ (see here for a personal ‘adversarial’ response to this, which might help explain a lot, not least an obsession with the romantically-named football clubs of Hungary and Budapest in particular which began in the 1970s and continues to this day) – in the form of Ujpesti Dozsa, who’d opposed British teams in numerous European club competition ties during the late Sixties to mid-Seventies, but had unfortunately been unable to make such a lyric scan.

Accordingly, and in particularly multi-nerdy manner, what is (re)presented below is a ‘hand-painted’ interpretation/approximation of the traditional Ujpesti Dozsa colours of purple and white – the former of which is perhaps a little too blue in hue, especially when compared to the mauve of Subbuteo vintage as they represented teams such as Anderlecht and ‘Austria Vienna’.

'Subbuteo Footballer #5 (Ujpesti Dozsa)

oil on canvas/35cm x 25cm/June 2018

This imagining of the ‘home’ colours of Ujpesti yet creates another doubt, of course – did the song’s character instead desire the ‘away’ version, and is another painting in order to address this possibility? To be brutally honest, another painting is already in order to address the failure of this unsatisfactory offering, so perhaps watch this space for further developments.

In other, more important news, there is coincidentally a brand-new Half Man Half Biscuit album, in vinyl LP, CD and mp3 download format, to enjoy, which is most advisable under these and indeed any circumstances.

Blue Sunday

'Subbuteo Footballer #3'

oil on canvas/40cm x 30cm/May 2018

Continuing the current theme and series of small paintings, this most recent one, brought to a resolution yesterday afternoon after a substantial session on Saturday, depicts another of the recently-acquired late-1980s' vintage Subbuteo 'lightweight' football (soccer) player figures, enlarged on the canvas to around x 10 scale, this one being from the 'blue' team in the boxed set, opposing the 'reds'.

Again, part of the challenge involves the 'Uglowian' representation of different types of plastic (the cup of the base into which the figure is fixed being of a particularly 'polished', highly-reflective-surfaced type not unlike a ceramic glaze), some of which has, obviously, a hand-painted finish applied to it, thus opening-up a dialogue between two forms of hand-painted object in the figure and the painting itself.

Showing Our Colours

'Subbuteo Footballer #2'

oil on canvas/40cm x 30cm/May 2018

Another in the current series of the still life paintings of miniature model football players, in this instance the object of active contemplation being a later-generation so-called 'lightweight' Subbuteo figure, dating from the late 1980s, recently acquired as a member of one of the two teams contained within a boxed edition of the game, discovered in a local antiques emporium at what was considered to be an affordable price.
As differing from the previous painting - that being a direct transcript of the observed subject - this one takes a certain artistic licence in that the colours sported by the figure have been invented in the hand-painted 'customised' manner of one's youth, and in fact are intended to represent those of Atlético Madrid, one of TOoT's favourite European clubs. As it so happened, the painted was resolved early on Wednesday evening, soon before the kick-off of that night's UEFA Europa League Final, subsequently won by Atlético by a 3 - 0 margin over Olympique Marseille, thus serving as something of a personal tribute to the victorious team.

Hand-Painted Figure

‘Subbuteo Footballer’
oil on canvas/40 x 30cm/May 2018

Following-on from the previous pair of entries and paintings, this latest effort on the easel, considered now to be at a point of resolution, depicts, via the painterly process, one of the miniature football player figures from a recently-acquired vintage ‘Subbuteo’team (the upscaling is about x10).

Contrary to the identifier scrawled upon the box by a previous owner (a name to which we are unable to subscribe in these parts), the thinking here is that the presence of the black-clad goalkeeper figure (surely inspired by the style preference of the legendary Lev Yashin) suggests, rather, that the team is intended to represent the Soviet Union circa early-1960s, a more palatable and indeed exotic and Europhilic, prospect. Nostalgia, naturally, pervades such an object containing a collection of objects, the ghosts of both one’s own and another’s (or others’) childhood making their presence felt – this is precisely the vintage of such toys, that have undergone various transitions since, that I was familiar with in the mid-1970s, the things to be collected and enjoyed immediately prior to developing a usurping passion in recorded music with an immersion in the contemporary post-punk sound (the two subsequently being brought together in the form of The Undertones‘ ‘My Perfect Cousin’ single and its accompanying artwork).

To return to the painting, as before there’s a little dialogue between the (quite roughly) ‘hand-painted’ nature of subject/object* and the painting itself and also a little something of that challenge of Euan Uglow‘s in representing the surface quality of plastic (as in the Homepride ‘Fred the flour-grader’ figure Uglow painted, followed suit by myself, in conversation with, last summer), more than one of which are present here – the base, its cup, is of a high-gloss nature that suggests nothing so much as a ceramic glaze, something to which we are no strangers here at TOoT and indeed have done battle with, again, to unsatisfactory effect, once again, quite recently (it occurs that this painting is, in effect, the familiar bowl-form – most often glazed or otherwise glass itself, highly reflective, with which I have been engaged on-and-off since undergraduate studies – with a vertical form filling and emerging from it!).

* A favourite pastime was to repaint the team sets one acquired to one’s own specifications, to ‘perfectionistically’ improve upon the quality-as-purchased, to take account of changing fashions/styles or otherwise individualise particular players.