Moçambique, woodland and fields

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 Praia Moçambique, woodland, oil on card, 12.5 x 12.5 cm   - available

Praia Moçambique, fields, oil on card, 12.5 x 14 cm  available

Two pochades painted on a productive day in the woods at Praia Moçambique.

It's the first time I've managed to do good work of the woods at Moçambique. The woods have a restful quality and I love to work in them. But after previous sessions I'd had to destroy what I'd painted. I'd been under under the spell of other painters and couldn't locate my own emotional responses, I 'd seen Munchs and Klimts everywhere, and had become inarticulate, and the work was stale.

This time I seemed not to give too much of a damn. I felt free: the pictures came.

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First leg on my Uruguayan trip: São Francisco de Paula (Rio Grande do Sul)

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 São Francisco de Paula, residential sttreet, oil on card, 15 x 12 cm  - unavailable

 São Francisco de Paula, lakeside, oil on card, 12 x 14 cm - unavailable

 São Francisco de Paula, road out of town, oil on card, 12.5 x 18 cm  SOLD

São Francisco de Paula, two travellers, oil on card, 13 x 15.5 cm - unavailable

 

 I`d driven through here before on my way to Gramado, and back and thought, "now this is interesting", in contrast to Gramado`s Walt Disney consumer Alpine, this is a lovely working city with it`s own atmosphere, well maintained with elegant lakes and good wooden domestic architecture.

Pity that I got bitten by a dog on the road out of town, above, where there is slum housing, You know you are still in the third world when there are dogs all over the place, something I didn`t see in Uruguay.

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The lakeside picture owes something to Klimt, with water on a square format. The last two relate to Corot. Nineteenth century painting, especially that which tackles themes of travel and exploration is very important to me, and there are whole schools that deal with this that are commonly ignored in standard British Art histories- most obviously the Russians and Americans.

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Beiramar Avenue from the mall; square format paintings

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Beiramar Avenue from the mall, oil on card, 10.5 x 10.5 cm - discarded

The square format was extensively explored by Klimt, often using- to my mind, somewhat mannered art noveau compositions. There are also a good clutch of very nearly square pictures by Hammershoi, the Danish genius.

The square format is symmetrical across 4 axes, and consequently a very stable form (I might speculate that Hammershoi did not use the perfect square because he was interested in maintaining a definate visual instability in his work).

It invites a sense of flotation, of hovering: I am not clear why. Could it be because, while a rectangular format invites a horizontal .linear reading, when confronted with a square, thes eye tends to meander and circle more within much more narrow bounds inside the frame?

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