The Dunes II - float framed

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The Dunes II, oil on card, 13.1 x 10 cm   - framed

Frame external edge- 16 x 19 cm

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Pine forest, Ordiequish

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Pine forest, Ordiequish, oil on card, 12 x 10 cm  - available

This was painted some years ago in Scotland.

It wasn`t put on Blogger then but I can`t think why not.  As time passes I can see more clearly which of my pochades is successful and which are weaker, and this seems to fall in to the former group.

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Urubici, small pochade of a mountain road, oil on card, 8.5 x 11 cm  AVAILABLE

Painted several years ago: I don`t know why I didnt show it: it seems to work to me.

Studio sale

 Pochades in a rack.

For the next four weeks all the pictures labelled "Pochades" available on this site are offered at a special reduced rate of 70  pounds sterling or other currency equivalent plus 20 pounds post and packing for up to three pictures.

Payment is by Paypal, cheque or SWIFT or direct transfer from a UK or Brazilian Bank.

Please contact me if you want more details or wish to see the pictures here in Florianopolis.

A doleful afternoon- houses and yards

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A doleful afternoon, oil on card, 12 / 15 cm - AVAILABLE

The view from my bedroom: previously visited in http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/2011/02/houses-and-yards-seen-through-gap.html

This view is larger.

Edinburgh: pochades; some conclusions; travel; thanks

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Edinburgh winter (Smith´s Place), oil on card, 11 / 13 cm  - available

Warehouses on Jane Street, Leith, oil on card, 9/ 12.5 cm  SOLD

Winter, Edinburgh  (Smith´s Place), oil on card, 11 / 13 cm  AVAILABLE

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I went up to Edinburgh and delivered paintings to the Union Gallery: they have a fair selection now from Brazil, Tunisia and the UK.

I stayed down in Leith- thanks to Anna and Kenneth for putting me up.

Very cold, of course, but splendid and Edinburgh is splendidly schizophrenic too: that mixture of elevated architecture and ground level squalor that characterises Georgian British cities. In Leith on the ground: endless pubs, cut-price barbers shops, Polish delicatessents, advice centres and pound stores:  magnificent, sometimes battered, soiled sandstone neo-classical  above.

While I was in Scotland, a painting sold at the Royal Scottish Academy :

Small Pines, oil on card, 10 / 12 cm   SOLD

Conclusions

The best paintings of the trip are those which refect some subjective intimacy with the place: ergo those from the UK are, I feel, in some way richer. The Tunisian ones tend, at their most slight, towards a sort of orientalist tourist painting,. This is because I felt some obligation to paint the things that most obviously define somewhere,  not unforgivably as those are the reasons for visiting in the first place. But all places have a skin and the skin is not necessarily as interesting as the other organs within.

But, of course, one develops subjective relations with a place over time, and as I plan more visits to the Islamic world  this will surely develop.

The better pictures were mostly not the larger size (5/ 13 cm or so) but smaller say (10/ 11 cm). This has something to do with concentration, and to do with the changes in light (this is much less of an issue in Brasil where the sun rises and sets rapidly and more or less stays put in between).

The boxes I  use to transport pictures are popular and I have to develop these: not necessarily to make them fancier, but perhaps to make more consistent in terms of quality. The buyers do not like polystyrene: a pity as it is very easy to use to for packing: they prefer cardboard which has more charm. Also, the boxes need better labelling. I need to make a simple label I can write on and sign to identify the pictures after painting.

I am annoyed with the photos I took of some of the pictures, which is not the fault of the camera but my own carelessness. So I must endeavor to improve that.

Travel

Travel is often detestable. Of course seeing new places new places and trying new food and so on is wonderful. I mean lugging things about, waiting in check-in queues, feeling very tired, being ripped off and worriying about something or other; misunderstanding something pitifully simple because your school French is rusty. Unpacking is a bore too, as is packing and wearing grubby clothes. If I were wealthy these travails would lessen considerably: sadly the likelihood of that in the near future is not high. The poorer traveller must rely on wit, good planning, stamina and  the friendship of strangers.

The Tunisia trip was reasonably good in this respect: I had the sensible notion that staying anywhere for less than two nights would mean all the above challenges would be increased. And the Rough Guide is really very good (though I arrived in El Jem to find that the only hotel had been demolished).

If one is visiting a new country there is the tendency to want to see everything. But really good painting, is not a product so much of the subject as the mindset of the maker. Good pictures are constructed on a balance of knowledge and its opposite: ignorance and surprise. So a short-ish  trip allows both, and fleeting fleeting visits are usually hopeless (digital photography, which has become almost cost free, is aften a false friend to the traveller as it encourages an erroneous notion that experience can effortlessly be "captured").

Thanks

Many thanks to those who helped me over this trip : Lise, Chris, my parents, Anna and Kenneth, Matthew Cushen, Chris Anderson, Bilel,  and Chokri.

And thanks to the many anonymous souls who helped out in the innumerable small ways that make life more than tolerable.

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Song of the Sea: art exhibition

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Song of the Sea

Convidamos nossos amigos para o vernissage de Tadeusz Deręgowski que se realizara no Espaço Cultural Rita Maria de 19 a 27 de Janeiro de 2012.

O coquetel de abertura será dia 19 de janeiro as 19 horas na galeria que fica na parte superior da Rodoviária Rita Maria.

Favor confirmar sua presença através do e-mail: tadeusz598@yahoo.co.uk

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Mais detalhes sobre o artista em:

http://tadeuszderegowski.blogspot.com/

ou

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tadeuszderegowski/sets/

Santa Catarina Road Trip 2011: fourteen paintings: the final set of four

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 Orleans, oil on card, 14 / 12.5 cm   AVAILABLE

Well, that was 2011: a strange and sometimes difficult year.



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Santa Catarina Road trip: fourteen Paintings: the second set of five

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Road, Paraíso, oil on card, 14.5 / 9.5 cm  Available

Street on the outskirts of São Miguel (lady with a parasol)
 oil on card, 13 / 12 cm  

Fazenda Derrubada, oil on card, 14.5 / 11.5 cm  available

Fields near Lages, oil on card, 14 / 11cm - unavailable




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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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The mountain, Palhoça; miniaturism

The mountain, Palhoça, oil on card, 11.7 / 14.7 cm

Palhoça is one of those towns on the periphery of Florianopolis, like so many satellite towns in other Brazilian cities, so undistinguished that is it difficult to know quite why it exists.

But there is the mountain: undeniable, like the mountains in Poussin, rendering all below to insignificance.

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Further thoughts on miniaturism, and small painting- notably the observations that the act of painting small seems happily to place one in opposition to bombast -as I write, as my country idiotically flings money at that costly, grandiose, pea-brained extravagance called the Olympic Games, giving good taxpayers money on ephemeral kitsch while cutting vital assistance for people with severe disabilities.

More pertinently, have not most art lovers at some point in their pilgrimages found themselves wandering with  dulled eyes through vast chambers in European Galleries and Palaces, uncharmed by endless rows of joyless gigantic Baroque paintings, extolling this or that official virtue, lined up in great halls in European galleries and palace, to find themselves suddenly delighted by a small and intimate painted voice?

Road-building 2, Lagoa; travel painting: my secret shame

Road-building, oil on card, 15 / 12 cm - discarded

A particularly shimmering day, God-made with Velázquez, perhaps.

This is the second of an open and occasional series tracing the building of this new suburban development being constructed on some heathland, which I had previously painted.

This time I am again on the rise, but about two hundred metres further over from the road.

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My secret shame as a painter of landscapes and whose work is increasingly dependent on travel, is that I dislike travel itself.

I don't like the actual processes of travel, apart from trains or the buying of tickets and planning as I find I find this stressful. I have generalised worries that something is going to go wrong. I don't like having to speak foreign languages and I feel nervous in new places. I am suspicious of all strangers, especially if they want to help me. I don't like hotels and hostels and I don't like strange food. I worry continually about being robbed or losing something. I resent paying huge sums for simple items and consumables. I don't like being alone for long periods and I don't like losing my routines.

In short, I am a pitiful traveller.

Quite what the solution to this is, I don't know, though I have found that the best thing is to imagine a worst case scenario ( robbed and gang raped in the mountains of Tunisia, reads the headline in the Daily Mail, perhaps), then judge the likelihood of this, then place all the other pettier worries on a sliding scale, to illustrate their triviality.

The benefits gained in terms of inspiration well exceed these caveats.

Praia Joquina: lifeguard; exhibition

Praia Joaquina: lifeguard, oil on card, 12 / 14.9 cm - available

I am thinking of having a little show consisting only of sea paintings. There are about 30 little ones in total. I wondered whether this might be monotonous, or whether the narrowness of theme could have the opposite effect, by encouraging comparisons.

I laid out the thirty paintings and they are not too bad, though I feel that it is probably better to present a smaller selection, say 12, because the eye gets weary, and showing too many things can have a cheapening effect.

Santo Amaro de Imperatriz from above

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Santo Amaro de  Imperatriz from above, oil on card, 11.2 / 13.5 cm - available

Another Saturday visit  to this beautifully located little town, which I love to paint.

I wish I could easily go and see some of Kokoschka's or Bomberg's paintings. Seeing things online is only really good as a reference and both were fellow itinerants, painting places from above.

Road-building I, Lagoa

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Road-building, Lagoa, oil on card, 13.5 / 12.5 cm - unavailable

A new suburban area being constructed where previously lay heathland.

The lake from Ishbel's house

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The lake from Ishbel's house, oil on card, 13.5 x 12 cm  AVAILABLE

 

 

The first of a little run of pictures from this beautiful house.

Many thanks to Ishbel for letting me work here, and for lunch. 

 

 

 

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Nocturne: in a new suburb

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Nocturne: in a new suburb, oil on card, 12 / 8.7 cm

Welcome to the new Florianopolis!: faceless blocks showing little imagination, with few green spaces, and little to delight. 

How do people remember which block is theirs?

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Entrance to a salvage yard

Entrance to a salvage yard, oil on card, 14.5 / 12 cm   SOLD

Painted in São José, among a network of streets where dilapidation is the norm. There seem to be a huge number of businesses devoted to car tyres in these run-down areas, these interzones, where towns becomes highways.

Poplars, Rio Tavares

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Poplars, Rio Tavares, oil on card, 12 / 14.5 cm - unavailable

Quite hot: delightful to drive down these back roads, to sit painting in the car, listen to Bach and then have a wonderful Brazilian kilo lunch.

It doesn't get much better.

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Popular housing, Saco Grande

Popular housing, Saco Grande, oil on card, 14.2 / 12 cm - unavailable

The dog decided to lie in the middle of the road: it disappeared when the drizzles came on.

A heavy day, pregnant with rain, lending that luminous light, which I perhaps haven't quite captured.

I am becoming more and more interested in the movements of people, making these poorer, car free places much more fun to work in.