Beiramar XX, session 9, 6pm

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Beiramar XX, session 9, 6pm, oil on card, 12 x 9 cm

 Beiramar XX, session 9, 6pm, oil on card, 12 x 8.5 cm  - available

Torrential rain here. Painted in the car.

The effect is remisicant of Ivon Hitchens  think, a painter whose work I like, but sometimes find a little facile, a little too charming and English.

On this matter, here is Anthony Blanche in Waugh`s Brideshad Revisited  criticising Charles Ryder`s Latin American pictures:

It was charm again, my dear, simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers…. I was right years ago… when I warned you. I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm…. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside of these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you. 

A similiar idea is sustained in Pevsner`s 1955, The Englishness of English Art.

House being built, stray dog

House being built, stray dog, oil on card, 14.5 / 11 cm - unavailable

A sort of kitchen sink realism here. There's a British school of painting which is very much about concentrated looking, and includes people as various as Bratby, Freud and Millais. Usually the subject matter of such pictures is banal and what matters is the intensity of scrutiny: it's anti-picturesque.

I must admit, that I don't actually much like this school, despite having entered the mindset myself here.

A quiet street

A quiet street, oil on card, 10.2 x 14.2 cm  - available

I had originally intended to title the picture "a boring street". I'd walked past it and thought, how spectacularly dull, I must try to paint it!, but of course as soon as I came here with my easel and started looking the more I found of interest. The little road leads to various research institutes each featuring rather anonymous buildings and, as with many academic institutions, there is a very particular atmosphere of "hush". The road curves round, undulating slightly.

This is one of the oddities of boring things: that is, when you start studying boring things they very quickly stop being boring. Martin Parr's collections of "Boring Photographs" illustrate this very plainly.

There is a tense stillness in paintings by Alfred Sisely, especially apparant in his paintings of floods at Port-Marly. This is one of the most Sisely-ish pictures I've done for a while.

Of the Impressionists, I feel the greatest connexion with Sisely: he isn't syrupy, like Renoir, or heavy like Pissarro, and he doesn't have Monet's inclination towards epiphany (which I don't give two hoots about, not having any mystical instincts whatsoever). His sensibility seems sensibly British: phlegmatic and free from melodrama and I love the sense of harmony in his works, which usually are constructed using a simple grid system.

The theme of silence, of boredom is very late nineteenth century: I suppose it relates to the often idle leisure class of the time and its evasion of social responisbilities.

The roots of a fallen tree

The roots of a fallen tree, oil on card, 10.6 x 8 cm; 54 US$

I haven't painted many things close up for a while.

In his excellent book, "William Nicholson", Samford Schwartz describes a certain type of very closely scrutinised painting of nature, apparantly without artifice, and exemplified most recently by Lucien Freud as tendency particular to British art. He includes Stanley Spencer and the pe-Raphaelites in this current.

Forest and Swamp- third stage

The slow addition of greens. I love the lushness of the Brazillian landscape.

I am trying to hold back from responding too rapidly with this painting and I guess it will take three more sessions. I'm enjoying the slowness, with a week between sessions.

It makes taking photos seem glib or shallow, as if imagemaking using photography is to easy that, ironically, it actually prvents one from really looking in the first place;.