As the exhibition date approaches more time has had to be spent in making arrangements and sorting out posters, framing, publicity and all the other things that need to be done. This has left less time for actual painting, and also less need to create more works as I already have more paintings than I actually need.
In the past few weeks however I have done one more new painting as it was something that I wanted to include in the exhibition, and I have been re-working another large painting that I had abandoned some time ago. The fact that this work was ‘disposable’ meant that I had no qualms about experimenting with it and this enabled me to work with greater freedom.
The work as I had left it back in August ’22 :
It is painted in oils and on a 100 x 100 cm canvas so I was keen to re-use the canvas if possible. I quite like the combination of the raw and burnt sienna with the grey but the structure of the image felt almost depressing with the way that the bands of colour sank down to the bottom right.
The large area of white at the lower edge didn’t feel right and in November of last year I had done some quick work on it but I was still unhappy with it and had put it away again.
Reducing the amount of white had helped but it still felt very dour. I thought that I would give it one last chance and having looked at it for a while I decided to turn the whole painting upside down.
I also painted over some of the more annoying sections of the painting and increased the textural feel of the image.
It is still not something that I would be happy with, but it is interesting how inverting the canvas meant that the structure now feels somehow more positive with the bands of colour rising at the right-hand side of the painting. For the moment it therefore has had yet another reprieve although at some point I may decide that this dead horse has been flogged enough.
New work
Linda and I had been working on the design of the poster and had combined one of my paintings with one of her photographs as the main image. This got us to thinking that these two images should be in the entrance way to the exhibition together with a bit of written blurb. This layout seemed to work well and it also meant that the large work that I had originally planned to put in the entrance could now be moved into the main gallery room where it fitted nicely with the other works. It did however mean that the far end wall of the gallery needed another painting. As this wall, which has a window overlooking the sea, forms the transition between Linda’s photographs and my paintings I felt that a more realistic work would lead from the landscape works into the more abstract work of my stone and shell paintings. I also wanted to reference the coastal nature of the exhibition as none of my planned paintings relate to the sea. I did however want to still keep the close focus on place as a concept rather than wide open vistas and so I decided to do a painting of the edge of the sea as it spills over the stones of the shingle beach.
The section of the wall beside the window is 1.3m wide and so a 60 x 60 cm painting would fit without getting cramped. Working in acrylics I used the same technique that I had used with the small ‘flower’ paintings to represent the shingle but on a larger scale.
My source image was cropped from a much larger photograph:
Although I was using this as a source I wanted to have more colour variation as the photograph tends to flatten everything down. Also I wanted to make a comment about the rising sea levels due to climate change and so I have tried to portray the waters slowly creeping up the beach.
I started with a grisaille over a black background:
Then added colour, shading and highlights:
