Priming

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Priming cards

The cards are cut from mat boards. I prime them with a mixture of  95% linseed oil , 3% turps and 2% oil paint for the first layer, then leave it to dry for a week. I recoat the cards with the same mixture a fortnight later.

 I wait another month then coat it in a layer which is about 90% titanium white and 10% turpentine.

I let it dry for at month before painting on it.

I rarely have problems with either sinkage or cracking, and have been using this formula for about five years.

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A photo from Bucharest, becoming an artist

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Bucharest, 2002

Here I am over twenty years ago in Bucharest in 1992. I had graduated from Edinburgh University two years before and was teaching English in Bayswater, London.

I'd taken the decision not to continue making art but to focus on teaching to make a living and get on the career ladder. That decision showed a failure of self-awareness, albeit an understandable one: I can teach, and that offered a much more secure financial future, but it wasn't a first instinct in the way making art is.

 

In addition, I'd thought that the pleasure I got from travel was just a phase, and that I could happily develop a life in London as permanent fixed resident, with all the usual stuff and relationships.

So, instead of accepting my nature- that of a nomadic and creative individual- I waged a campaign against my instincts and tried to force myself into a condition I did not suit, throwing moralist arguments about the "good of society" or, "duty" or "career" at myself. I had had some ideas that "happiness came not from pursuit of suit of self interest but in the fulfillment  of duty" (which is not a direct quote from Saint-Exupery, but could well be).

In short, I'd thought that  making art could be relegated to the status of a hobby and tried to suppress my desire to make it.

Eventually I came to my senses.

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Table, bottle, The Old Patagonia Express

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Table, bottle, The Old Patagonia Express, plate, oil on card, 13 x 14 cm  available

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A bowl on a tray and a plate with apples; painting in monochrome

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A bowl on a tray and a plate with apples, oil on card, 11 x 13 cm - available

I had the idea that on one of the trips I should eschew colour entirely and just work with black and white,  or dark sepia, this sustaining a deeper understanding of this fascinating area.

I like the way subtleties of brush movement, or of texture or tone become highlighted and how using black and white tips one into abstraction. Perhaps London, already monochrome in Portland Stone and steel sky would be the ideal place to experiment?

Colour is heady and tends to obliterate appreciation of anything but itself. It's like a drug, and like a drug you need to take more and more for the same effect. That does you no harm, though appreciation of anything grows with its absence.

A puritanical, or perhaps merely ascetic, side to my nature, Scottish or Danish in origin, lends me to suspect any too easily won aesthetic pleasure.

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A bowl, a spoon, tomatoes, papers

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A bowl, a spoon, tomatoes, papers, oil on card, 12.5 x 14.2 cm - unavailable

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A bowl and four tomatoes

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A bowl and four tomatoes, oil on card, 15.3 x 13 cm - unavailable

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A poem about Britain in thirty pictures

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Thirty pochade carriers for the U.K.

I think of the trip as a poem, the paintings bearing more similarity in their subjective qualities to this than to any topographical survey. A poem about Britain in thirty pictures. Or fewer, as I may ditch some later. The schematic quality of the project is satisfying, but such schematic notions can stultify. It's better to just get on with the work and see if anything good happens. 

 As the trip approaches I regret not giving more time to it, but the UK is an expensive place to travel in, and simply does not represent good value, both food and accommodation being very costly. It is wiser to put the money aside for use in Ecuador next year.

The carriers in their playschool colours when laid out like that are reminiscent of Klee's* Magic Squares. This external character a little different from their sober insides:

Open carrier 

Some of the carriers have been reused many times on different trips and I like the sense that they have a garnered a history. I enjoy repairing them and trying to trying ways to make make them ever more robust containers.

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Like many, I guess, I feel a certain pessimism about the way the UK is going, that the better elements in the society are suppressed and a strange and reckless yet powerful group is determining its future.


* a fine travel-painter

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