Painting in Trindade/ the blocky style - blocks, Trindade

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Blocks, Trindade, oil on card, 20.5 x 25 cm   available

Painting in Trindade

There are an increasing number of new blocks, none of which have much aesthetic merit or even interest. But I am trying to find something in the patterns of their facades. The older architecture isn't that interesting either, to be honest, but there are one or two older houses which have a certain charm. 

It's good to work around here, to walk to destinations and to feel that one is discovering ones own neighborhood. 

I'm working larger. I want boldness, a poster-like quality, like those famous Deco posters used for tourism advertisements- I'm preparing for Chicago which I shall try to paint in a broad and audacious manner.

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The Blocky Style
or
 fat crude lively pictures... 

The pictures here are larger than I have painted for a while and the idea is to construct a new style

The features of the new style are- 

1. thick outlines describing elements

2. clear colours

3. limited colour range

4. simple geometrical shapes 

5. cheerful storybook atmosphere.

To assist working on a larger scale I reduce to palette to four colours- a blue, white, a yellow and a warm dark colour such as a red or brown. This makes mixing easier. I use big fat brushes too. It might end up looking a lot like Sironi but less sad.

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Style

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Until a few years ago I believed that an artist should have one style. This was proof of something called authenticity, which I believed was the basis of good art. I believed in authenticity because I was quite serious, and because I had a puritanical streak, and because it was the cultural norm at the time.

This meant that art had also to be difficult, both technically and in terms of comprehensibility.

In the last few years my attitude has changed, however. It's not that my previous beliefs are invalid, it's more that I see the easy possibility of them existing alongside other beliefs- an artist can be playful, slight and entertaining or populist one day, serious and elevated the next.

This is by way of an explanation of the variety of styles and approaches I am using. They each allow me to express different things, and the one does not cancel out the other.

These statements may seem obvious, but it should be born in mind that until Post-modernism really set in - and in Scotland, where I trained, this was not until the late 90s- artists were expected to restrict themselves to one medium, one subject, so that if an abstract expressionist painter in acrylics decided to produce a figurative lithograph this was viewed with some suspicion. I suspect that some of the suspicion was led by marketing concerns- it's much harder to market an artist whose work varies enormously.

But given how little art most artists sell, and I include myself- worrying about providing a consistent product seems extremely vain, to say the least.