Praia Brava

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Praia Brava, June 19, 2023 watercolour, A2

Praia Brava, June 19, 2023 - detail

Praia Brava, June 19, 2023 - detail

Praia Brava, June 19, 2023 - detail

I'm going for a greater variety of marks and movements on this larger size. I want to be acting on the paper in a looser way. 

I'm trying to give a structure to this with a underlying grid - in all this influenced by Klee and Scandinavian painters Tammisaari and Tal R.

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Corrego Grande, a path; dots and lines; Paul Klee

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Corrego Grande, a path, oil on card, 26 x 28 cm - duscarded

I`m attempting to use dots and simple lines and blocks for fun, to give a cryptic aspect to the picture. I set myself a challenge, a limitation on the sort of marks I can use. There seems something intrinsically humorous about the dot, I guess maybe because of how a dot can make such a strong impression despite being so little

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I've been interested in the dot, or dab for a while but I think for some sessions I'll give it particular attention.

This kind of approach to painting is like trying to make a musical composition for certain selected instruments except I have the additional issue of representation. I guess it I`m following Paul Klee though I am not sure he worked much directly from nature.

I am continuing in the suburb that I visited last week. 

Today one of the residents brought me a plate of food for lunch- very kind.

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Puzzle: can you find the man in the picture?

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A poem about Britain in thirty pictures

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Thirty pochade carriers for the U.K.

I think of the trip as a poem, the paintings bearing more similarity in their subjective qualities to this than to any topographical survey. A poem about Britain in thirty pictures. Or fewer, as I may ditch some later. The schematic quality of the project is satisfying, but such schematic notions can stultify. It's better to just get on with the work and see if anything good happens. 

 As the trip approaches I regret not giving more time to it, but the UK is an expensive place to travel in, and simply does not represent good value, both food and accommodation being very costly. It is wiser to put the money aside for use in Ecuador next year.

The carriers in their playschool colours when laid out like that are reminiscent of Klee's* Magic Squares. This external character a little different from their sober insides:

Open carrier 

Some of the carriers have been reused many times on different trips and I like the sense that they have a garnered a history. I enjoy repairing them and trying to trying ways to make make them ever more robust containers.

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Like many, I guess, I feel a certain pessimism about the way the UK is going, that the better elements in the society are suppressed and a strange and reckless yet powerful group is determining its future.


* a fine travel-painter

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Papier-mâché birds; toys and sculpure

Here's a collection of papier mache birds I've been working on over the last few days.

The thing is to find the right degree of anthropomorphism: the right balance between bird and suggested human characteristics for them to be fun.

They need to dry a little before I can work more into them, making their surfaces more even and improving their tails and beaks. Later they will be painted.

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At what point does a toy become a sculpture? At the point at which it is too precious or serious looking to be played with, I guess.*

Play is regarded with tremendous suspicion in our culture though it lies beneath so many artistic endeavors. I suspect play is regarded with suspicion because it is regarded as the opposite of work, and Western societies are very much in thrall to the Protestant Capitalist ethos, whereby all activities must have a known, profitable end- to the extent that people are encouraged to feel bad about themselves when they aren't working, no matter how unfulfilling the jobs available to them are.

*Alexander Calder is an exception to this. Paul Klee, like Picasso, is playful but you couldn't really play with his works. Perhaps readers have other examples?