Praia Moçambique, looking across heathland

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 Praia Moçambique,  looking across heathland

 oil on card, 30 x 27 cm -  -unavailable

 

 

 

 

 

Praia Moçambique, detail, looking across heathland- detail

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of my more van Gosh-ish peices, with a rolling, hummocky landscape.

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A trip to Chile: Melipeuco, part 4, a road

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Melipeuco, a road, an itinerant, oil on card, 29 x 23.5 cm SOLD

One of the most successful of the trip- though I must say that I`m happy with the work overall. There`s a big van Gogh influence here, of course, and maybe also something of Gillies. 

It`s funny how sometimes pictures just come together, at other times the thing limps along. It`s quite unpredictable, even after years of working.

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Flowers, Vuillard, 12 x 12 x 12

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Flowers, oil on card, 8.5 x 12 cm

There was a big Vuillard show in in London some years back at the Royal Academy, and I kick myself for not having gone- though in truth these large shows have become increasingly unpleasant because of crowds. 

The last of these blockbusters that I went to weas Turner, Monet, Whistler and it was more or less impossible to enjoy the work because of the bus station atmosphere.. I don`t know where all these people have come from, exhibitions didn`t seem to be so tremedously popular in my day. I am dubious that they illustrate a surge of interest in the arts- most museums and galleries remain blissfully quiet most of the time.

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I have decided to work on a series of pictures about the apartment, and the things in it for Jim Mendola`s monthly `12 x 12 x 12 event- which is mainly a music thing, but which is open to other media.

 As I envisage them, these pictures will stylistically and thematically extend from yesterdays carafe and today`s flowers to describe the atmosphere of the apartment and who I am: a sort of autobiography in objects- van Gogh meets Guston and Vuillard at a party and they start talking in low voices.

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A folding chair and an open book

A folding chair and an open book, oil on card, 14 x 14 cm - unavailable

Like beds, chairs seem rarely to have been used as artists as motifs: I can only think of van Gogh`s wonderful pictures.

Perhaps you can think of some others?

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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Night

Night, oil on card, 13 x 10 cm

  

This time I attempted to paint the stars through the mesh of branches: next time I will simply paint the stars in the sky. 

I stand joyfully on the shoulders of V. van Gogh.

Isn't it odd how few paintings there are of ths night sky, given how amazing it is to see?

A yellow boat

A yellow boat, oil on card,  15.2 x 10.2 cm  SOLD

As I was painting I kept thinking of van Gogh's famous fishing boats on the beach, then of Puvis de Chavanne's "Poor Fisherman" picture. I looked these up and they are not really similar to mine, nor is Redon's "Yellow Boat".

I carry memories of pictures, and they serve as inspiration, but when I look them up after having painted I find my memories to be totally erroneous.

A chair and my white coat

A chair and my white coat, oil on card, 8.7 x 10.3 cm  SOLD

House, Itacorubi

This sort of weather- rapidly changing, dramatic- makes for marvellous photos, with a late van Gogh / Vlamink feel to them.

Sometimes photography seems too easy to be considered an art form. Or have I just got a selp-punitive instinct, to believe that something worthwhile must necesarily be difficult?