A Moroccan Adventure: Ouarzazate and around.

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People in the street, oil on card, 14 x 15 cm   SOLD

I spent a week in Ouarzazate, a serene place, with clear light, known for film studios, and as a gateway to the Atlas Mountains.

There seems to be no advertising at all, and few cars, which made me feel as if I were in an old Eastern European city in Communist times. The shops do not have elaborate signs or names either. This helps lend the place its peculiarly calm feeling. Here and there people sell things in the street: shoes, tools, magazines, but the streets are wide and clean, and calm. The buildings usually open flush onto to street, without gardens or porches, and are particularly boxy. Almost everything is peach coloured, including the pavements, some of which are painted thus.

Clouds, oil on card, 15 x 15.5 cm   SOLD

 Near the mosque, oil on card, 12.5 x 15.5 cm  SOLD

 A shop selling bric-a-brac, oil on card, 13.5 x 16.5  SOLD

A boy with a scooter, oil on card, 17 x 17.5 cm

This above, and the piece opening this posting were both painted from my hotel window and seem very de Chirico-an to me.

Mosque on a plain, oil on card, 13.4 x 16.4  SOLD

View of the mountains, oil on card, 12.5 x 15.5 cm   SOLD

I hired a little car (very cheap!) and drove into a mountain valley, entering through Ait Benhaddou and returning via Telhouet. This region is very dry, having suffered from droughts, and where vegetation appears it is almost surreally bright.

A distant ksar, valley near Ouarzazate, oil on card, 14 x 16 cm

Boys playing football, village near Ouarzazate, oil on card, 16.5 x 17.5 cm  SOLD

I can become sentimental at the sight of children playing football in empty patches of earth all over the world, from Brazil to North Africa: an international game, spontaneously and freely organised by children themselves, happily, without supervision, at minimal cost and one in which disputes  are usually amicably resolved. This can be taken as a rebuke against the regimented world of the British child.

A gorge, oil on card 16 x 16 cm            AVAILABLE

Valley, oil on card, 18 x 15 cm  - available

The mountains are big, the pictures are not, and I began to sense the limits of the small scale I use, which is better at intimacy than grandeur, better at the small and enclosed world of towns than vast spaces. On the other hand, this may be simply a question of personality: after All Turner succeeded with describing the epic in tiny watercolours, and it could be then that my nature is simply unsuited to grand themes.

A ksar, oil on card, 16 x 14 cm   unavailable

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These paintings are available through this art dealer, based in central London:

ROSE ISSA PROJECTS

82 Great Portland Street London W1W 7NW 

T 0207 602 7700. T 0207 323 1710

 E info@roseissa.com


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Santa Catarina Road trip: Fourteen Paintings: the first four

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The BR 282 near the turnoff to Urubici, oil on card, 13/ 11cm  (damaged/ discarded)

Campos Novos: a view from a hotel, oil on card, 13 / 11 cm - discarded

Campos Novos: the evening skateboarder

 oil on card, 11.5 / 13.5 cm discarded

Industrial building on the outskirts of Maravilha, oil on card, 14.5 / 11.5 cm - available

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Itinerary:

Day one: Florianópolis- Lages- Campos Novos
Day two: Campos Novos- São Miguel do Oeste
Day three: São Miguel do Oeste- Paraíso- São Miguel do Oeste
Day four: São Miguel do Oeste- Chapecó- Curitibanos
Day five: Curitibanos- Orleans
Day six : Orleans- Florianopolis

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Five nights and six days driving and stopping: fourteen paintings. Doing more in my little Celta would be hard as my right arm started to ache badly: it's a city car really. 

But I feel I've won a good sense of the state: there isn't now a region I haven't visited. The most interesting, both culturally and topographically, is the Serra from Lages through to Orleans, where Brazilians of usually Central European descent live in a landscape of considerable variety, with amazing mountains and valleys, where the temperature varies much and little communities heft there way forward, steadily in coloured wooden houses, like characters from Growth of the Soil.

I've no truck with the rubbishy modern Brazil of identikit shopping malls and degrading television. Nor do I find much in the Brazil of Carnival and foolishness, which serves as a palliative for low educational expectations and squalor. I don't like the Brazil of Brasilia and of bureaucracy and politics and greed and legal minds. I detest the disorder and filth of the big cities, and those rich Brazilians in their preposterous four-wheel drives and Barbie wives and smugness, cruising from their costly prison-condominiums through dismal streets where beggars and drug-addicts sleep in thousands, to office blocks whose only architectural qualities are their lack of distinction. And I find the holiday Brazil of beaches and sungas indescribably banal.

I sense an intrinsic worth to the communities that patiently tend their allotments late into the evenings, and who are polite, conservative and, at least superficially or sentimentally, religious. I like the sun hardened faces of the people with their stern lines and reserve, I like seeing them with their cattle or driving their trucks and I like how they don't say too much and are modest and tough.

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I don't entirely like travel, with its dislocations and the mental travails that it brings in the melancholy of strange evening hotels: does the work make it worthwhile?

Glancing over, there are good individual pictures, but across the series there are too many repetitions of design, often a consequence of using the same level of distance from the motif, usually with little foreground.

And I'm wary that I'm starting to use and re-use certain "catchphrase"  brush strokes- typically a certain whiplash line-a mannerism, I should be careful not to habitualise. The solution is to re-think the entire architecture of the painting: to begin at another point: though quite what that means in practice I am not clear as yet. It has something to do with classicism, to do with reinvesting in the underlying construction of the work and the conscious rejection of  easy gestures.

Also, the small standardised format is becoming too much the same: it's become a limitation. So I need to vary more, with some larger pieces, about A5, I reckon.

There's a sky-land dichotomy which all landscapists face: an obvious central contrast defining the composition from the onset.  But when landscapists like Klimt rebel against that format, the result often appears contrived, as if the novelty of composition has taken over from the actual perception of nature: so I’m somewhat uncertain how to vary this, or even if it is in vain to try.

The landscapist makes a peculiar claim to be painting the world (at the other end of the spectrum is the still lifer, though those philosophically minded might say that there is no less of the world in a flower petal than in a an entire Alpine vista) and from this derives the ecstasy that landscapists feel: a pantheistic joy so glamorously conveyed in van Gogh, Munch and Turner. Ergo, there is a weight of responsibility upon him, not necessarily present in other genres.

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Sunset, Praia Mole; Chile; Rio

Sunset, Praia Mole, oil on card, 9.6 x 12 cm  SOLD

Very Turnerish picture: does the obvious beauty of such a subject and the fact that it is such a staple of populist art make it a no go area for painters? One might respond: no, it depends on your capacity for interpretation.

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Today I shall try to get a guide book on Chile and make more pochade carriers for Rio, where I'll go at the end of September to paint and court galleries.

Nocturne: buildings opposite; paintings of cities in Britain

Nocturne: buildings opposite, oil on card, 9 x 11cm  SOLD

I started painting this in a pointellist style, then decided this was much too fiddley for the effects I wanted, and repainted it entirely in a broad strokes. Sometimes the best methods are obvious, but my instinct to fiddle- to seek to justify myself leads me astray.

On the other hand, however, it can be argued  that the initial phase was a necessary exploatory corollary to the latter, broader and rapid painting process.

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Cities viewed depicted from above are a visual summary of a place: a speciality of T|urner and later ofKokoshka, both artists who travelled widely. It's nice to have this massive scale as a constrast to closer views. Of course it helps enormously if the city being portrayed has hills nearby, or, if the artist has access to high buildings.

I am thinking of trying to paint London from either Crystal Palace (where I have never been before), or from Parlianment Hill. Then, Edinburgh from Arthur's Seat, Carlton Hill, from the Castle, or the Braid Hills, Glasgow from the Necropolis (well worth a visit in itself) and Aberdeen from either Kincorth Hill or, if I can get access, one of the high university buildings.

Rough sea, Priaia Mole

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Rough sea, Praia Mole, oil on card, 9.2 x 7 cm   AVAILABLE

A windy, sometimes wet day: Turner would have been happy. Tomorrow, I shall do another here.

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I've been loading the images on Flicker and Facebook at too high a pixellation so that when people click on them they fill the whole of their screens. I'm going to use a much lower hieght-width ratio in future.

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Road, Itacorubi

Road, Itacorubi, oil on card, 12.2 x 9.5 cm

A beautiful day for painting: I've been looking at paintings by Whistler and Turner, admiring the magical way paint is used as an expressive element in itself. Painting the sea is especially enjoyable as a vehicle for this.

I"ve feeling very positive about these little pictures as if, finally, I have turned some sort of "corner".