A little drive south: Laguna; attempting to work much more quickly

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Laguna 

 

 

 

Sun, Laguna, oil on card, 20.7 x 24 cm - unavailable

 

 

 

 

Laguna, July 2022, oil on card, 28 x 25.5 cm SOLD

 

 

Laguna, July 2022 - detail

 

 

Laguna was beautiful, empty of tourists and full of silent charm. The way the town perches between lake and sea and hills is wonderful.

I will certainly return.

 

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Attempting to work much more quickly

 

My logic is this: that the paintings are "worked out" within the first fifteen minurtes, after which there is a period essentially of filling in which takes up to thirty minutes. 

From experience, I can say that almost nothing I do after these forty-five minutes will make much difference- except perhaps to weary the picture by overworking it. That means the colours becoming increasingly grey or brown or just dirty, and brushstrokes losing their sharpness as marks are "corrected".

 In addition, the longer I work the greater the possibility that the scene will change, usually because of the sun moving.

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Trees and houses by a lake, winter, Lagoa

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Trees and houses by a lake, winter, Lagoa   AVAILABLE

 oil on card, 25.8, 28 cm

An example of the blocky style, bold and almost poster-like. 

I started working in this way when I began working on a larger scale. The methods I'd used previously were fine for a smaller size, but become fussy when I moved up in scale. I wanted the work to express very simply the strong immediate feeling you get when arriving in a location, and wanted to to do so using big brushes and strong colours. 

I pinched ideas from Travel Posters of the 1930s, children's art, Japanese ink drawing and German expressionism. 

The style is hard to get right, you can easily over-work. Or one of the colours will have got dirty and when its complete you wonder if that matters and should you just start again? Or sometimes the light changes so that the reference for the immediate sensation that inspired you is lost, and with it the painting.

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Urubici: two recent paintings

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Urubici, boys playing football, oil on card, 14 / 14 cm   AVAILABLE   

Urubici, ploughed field, oil on card, 12 / 13 cm   AVAILABLE

I spent the last two days in Urubici, in the mountains. I painted eight pictures, I'll show the rest tomorrow.

Something I like about Urubici is the fact that it has a street life, with children playing football or in groups conversing. I like the people who seem unpretentious and industrious, and are a relief from the people of the island who are rather fond of themselves. I also love the smell of woodsmoke drifting down the town's solitary high street, and I love the towns mysterious setting among woods and surrounded by mountains.

And, as a painter, Urubici is great for having an especially sharp clear light: you occasionally get that in Florianopolis but it's much less common. 

I guess these are the most German Expressionist influenced pictures I've done for a while. I'm playing about with new methods: working more quickly, but also discarding more, the idea being to maintain a sense of energy within each picture.

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Two recent pochades with coins for scale; painting pochades

Two recent pochades with coins for scale: a Brazillian centavo, a British penny, a US quarter and a Euro.

The size below has become roughly my standard- a little smaller than a postcard. The paintings are completed in about an hour, which is a good length of time to paint plein air here in Brazil, giving the speed of changing atmospheric conditions (in the UK it is might be less), and it allows me to produce a "finished" looking picture on this size. I sometimes work a little larger, and as above, sometimes smaller- though I find this somewhat fiddly.

I like working quickly, and in a burst: I find it exciting, in a way that is analagous to being a live performer. Instead  of making a studio recording: it stands or fails as I make it, there's no secondary editing process. I produce a good number of duds, at least 10%.

A certain number of duds are a certainty at any scale: that's a necessary collorary to being at all experimental, but at least I don't spend weeks and much money producing them. It is difficult for me to know immediately whether a picture is a dud or not and sometimes I am decieved, only realising later that a picture is poor. But it is very hard for me to find guiding principles: the jugement is subjective and falls outside words. This is one of the things that animates me to make art: the simple difficulty in knowing for sure which guiding principles- outside mere technical judgements- will produce good pictures.

The paintings can be easily stored and posted, and are accessable to people on lower incomes.

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.

Across the lake from the dunes

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Across the lake from the dunes, oil on card, 10 x 13.2 cm - available

Painted very quickly in Lagoa: there is a play off between speed and accuracy, freshness and finish. Work too fast and you lose finish and accuracy; work too slow and the picture becomes tired.

I'm going to work on some fast pieces, each to take a maximum of twenty minutes. I'll keep the best only. This might be the ideal wat to work in the UK where the weather changes so often.

Fast painting

I used to believe that the more slowly and deliberately a thing was done- specifically a work of art- the better. I thought that because I saw slowness as proof of deliberation, thoughtfulness, and care.

These concerns were fundamentally moral. They don't necessarily need to be present in the aesthetic sphere- a work of art can equally well be spontaneous, thoughtless and careless. It just depends on your terms.

There's no proving that one set of values is better than the other because in the end the artwork is just a thing: it has no moral life and - though part of me rages against this- it doesn't really matter very much in the scheme of things anyway.

Personally, I've always been a much better fast artist than a slow one. If the pace is too slow I get bored- I don't concentrate more. On the contrary, if I have too much time to make corrections then I over-edit. I fuss, changing things that don't need changing, blunting my original message with compromise.

This is partly why monotype is such an appealing medium for me, it's "time-limited", you have to get the image right in an hour or two or the ink dries. But I have attempted to discover the same midset in painting, here.