Shop window- a homage to William Sickert...or perhaps Edward Hopper..?

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Shop window, oil on card, 14 x 9.5 cm  AVAILABLE

The first of a run of pictures of shop windows: a sort of homage to Sickert, or perhaps Hopper. I'd intended to start this investigation some years ago, but somehow never got onto it.

I'll paint them mostly in the centre of Florianopolis, at the weekends when it's quiet there.

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Near UDSC, Florianopolis

Near UDSC, oil on card, 15.5 x 8.5 cm

There is a good modernist church here, distantly influence by Corbusier's Ronchamps, I suppose, and I'd originally intended to depict it: instead I give you the curves of the road, the trees and that created by the garage in the distance.

I'll go back and do the church later.

This painting looks very much like 1930's painting to me: a generic sort of forties painting, maybe Edward Hopper, maybe Rex Whistler, maybe Balthus.

Elevated Highway; Inter-urban painting

Elevated highway, oil on card, 12.5 x 10.2 cm; 54 US$ or equivalent - removed

One of a series of paintings which will feature the roads and suburban architecture that is a response to, and product of Florianopolis's intensive car culture (car ownership for the city runs at 50% per capita, an incredible number given the cost of cars relative to income in Brasil, and when you consider that this includes children and people incapable of driving).

The phenomenon of this interurban architecture is excellently considered in "Italy - Cross Sections of a Country," Scalo Zurich, 1998) by Stefano Boeri, which charts his work with the photographer Gabriele Basilico, describing the urban sprawl along various Italian highways, and with it the destruction of 19^th century city spaces and lifestyles.

This terrain has also been visited by painters before, most obviously Edward Hopper, and there are various other American artists who've dealt with this sort of landscape, including photo-realists.

Painting such scenes is not pleasant as it requires spending time in settings which are inhumane, good only for cars, often noisy and polluted. And a major reason for many painters for being painters is romantic rebellion: a pastoral retreat into the countryside, an escape from this suburbanity. I have those romantic tendencies myself. This world of parking lots and highways and shopping malls and storage lots, all interconnected by tarmac is disturbing, apparently centreless: the world of J. G. Ballard.

Tyre Shop- Stage 3

It started to rain and I got utterly soaked. I worked back into this without blacks or browns: this freshend it up. I don't think it needs too much more work, just some attention to details of the telegraph posts, wires and kerbs.

Tyre Shop

Another painting based on the low story, ad-hoc buildings that are the norm in Brazil, scruffily lining the roads.

How to mainting the energy of the underpainting, to carry it through to the paintings final stages? It seems a hatefully difficult task, and I fear that I failed to do this in "House among Woods", below. Sometimes I think the medium of oils is not right for me, because it seems to encourage a definate heaviness. At other times I feel that that heaviness is a value in itself, worth enjoying.

As a rule, for me, a picture should be completed fairly rapidly: if it starts to require "messing" then it's usually because the thing was misconceived in the first place.

New paintings, canvas

Two new paintings; their first stages.

I'm continuing to explore tonal painting, with references to Sickert, Hammershoi and Hopper (late Edwardian and Early modern art). I want to continue working on a simple style, very straighforward and uncontroversial, and to continue exploring the changing urban environment near here, and the changing relationships between old and new buildings and nature.

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It's surprising how little aware many oil painters are of the importance of the painting surface, specifically that the sort of acryllic pre-primed canvases, cheaply available in the art shops are massively substandard, and will result in much less sucessful paintings.

This is because of the way these cheap canvases absorb paint, and how they make it hard to paint in glazes. I have resolved to chuck out all the cheaper type cnavases I have, to avoid the temptation to repaint on them, and only to use the better oil primed canvas available from the UK.