Old Glory Creole Jazz Band painting

All went well in the benefit auction of this piece on July 17th 2010 and from that a handsome sum donated towards running future Lafrowda Festivals.

What’s been so good about this Bath showing of Lived-in Landscapes is that transplanting these images out of their usual Cornish context has highlighted their underlying content for me; in other words that they’re not just about living in Cornwall but about the broader issue of how people interact with landscape.

The Chapel Row Gallery has been an excellent venue to bring out this aspect. It’s ambience is reminiscent of that ocean light that was the theme of my previous show in Falmouth. As such it’s been sympathetic to the Cornishness of these new pictures while enabling them to ”breathe” and so communicate something of the influence of that human presence that is their real theme.

A big thankyou to Gabrielle Hawkes who helped bring out this underlying theme in her introduction to the catalogue that you can read by clicking here.

For the last eight years I’ve been doing paintings based on the Lafrowda Day parades that are the culmination of our Lafrowda Festival in Cornwall’s most westerly town of St Just-in-Penwith. Seven years ago the picture I’d made based on the 2003 Festival sold at a benefit auction for the Cornish art archive and every year since then I’ve run benefit auctions of these paintings for the Lafrowda Festival itself, an event that is expensive for our local community to put on and that is well worth your support.

This year I again ran such an auction. This time the piece was my Lafrowda 2008  painting  based on groups of drumming, banner waving school-children as they processed past my studio to the accompaniment of Samba bands. Again I was able to raise a substantial sum to donate toward the running of future festivals in the town.

This year it was the New Orleans style marching band heading up the lantern procession at the end of Lafrowda Day in mid July that provided my inspiration and led to the recently completed Old Glory New Orleans Jazz band painting. The bold shapes and brassy colours emerging from the night were irresistable to me and I lost no time in getting to work so that now at the beginning of September as I write the new piece has just appeared here (click on the title above to view the picture).

This year I’m running things a little differently for the benefit sale of the picture. First of all I’m currently intending to include it in my Lived-in landscapes shows next spring and to this end I’ve put an exhibition price on it. However from now until the New Year a 25% discounted price is available to anyone prepared to take delivery of the picture (postage and packing included) after the last showing of the exhibition which ends on 11th June 2010. Apart from £75 retained to cover materials and publicity costs the proceeds will be donated as before to Lafrowda Festival.

It may be that it doesn’t sell in this way in which case it will be up for auction on Lafrowda day 2010 like it’s predecessors and as before I’m starting the auction online. Bids start at the figure of £75 so that I can be sure to cover costs as explained above. This year too I’ll be sending a rolled unmounted print to everyone who makes a bid and will do so straight away when you send me the address to send it to! You can be a part of this by making a bid for the painting through the contact page. Of course if it sells through the exhibition or online in the meantime, or if someone else tops your bid, you’ll have won a free print as a thankyou for supporting this fund-raising effort!

I’ve been accumulating a collection of new work towards my next exhibition.

What’s been guiding my approach to image making since October 2008 has been a fascination with all those aspects of landscape that suggest human presence. Having a stronger than ever awareness of this aspect as I roam the countryside now has led me to see it as what I’m calling a Lived-in Landscape. This all started with realising that the theme of a cluster of buildings, that was present in some of the collection that made up my previous exhibition at Falmouth Arts centre last October, was something I wanted to explore further. Then, as I began to pursue this theme I found myself drawn to depicting other features reflecting human presence and influence such as field patterns, tracks through the landscape, the maritime landscape of Mounts Bay and an incident in the mining history of the area. So this thematic element is one lived-in aspect of this new collection.

Another aspect which I’m becoming increasingly aware of is more to do with the process of painting or drawing. This relates to the fact that translating these images into varied areas of colour, tone and texture involves literally living in these compositions that derive from the landscape. My hope is that the experience of lingering over the colour mixtures, the paint layering and the brush or finger marks that I use begins to coax a feeling of life into what I’m doing. This is something that I relish and that gradually leads me to a sense that the piece that I’m working on is beginning to have a life of its own. My aim is to bring this quality to a pitch of vividness which is unique to the painted image and not simply a reflection of the life situation that I’m depicting.

The part of Cornwall where I’m based has a rich and varied history. Centuries of farming and a long history of mining have left a clear imprint. What has attracted me to explore this aspect of the landscape has ranged from field patterns  to hollow lanes, to people working on the land, to ancient sites,  to clusters of buildings, to people celebrating on a summer evening, to maritime activitiy in Mounts Bay and finally to what to me was a haunting image from the tragic history of tin and copper mining in the area.

Two books have resonated for me with the experience of living with these landscapes. One was The Making of the English Landscape by W. G. Hoskins which was recommended by a visitor to my stduio back in the spring of 2009. Its reference to the great antiquity of some of Penwith’s field boundaries in particular struck me and then led to a sense of how pervasive human influence has been in forming many aspects of our landscape. The other was a novel called John Pascoe by J. C. Tregarthen whose imaginative recreation of a young man’s experience of life in 19th century Penwith helped to make more vivid my sense of this as a truly human landscape. 

When the collection reached completion and I had booked the gallery at Trereife House near Penzance as the venue for the exhibition from May 28^th – June 10^th 2010, I felt that this had been a delightfully varied journey that I’d been on.  What all these pieces have in common for me is a sense of the life-states of those who have lived here, of their persisting reality being reflected back to me and lived-in again through the process of painting.

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In the ocean light: This is the title of the exhibition at the Spring and Steele Galleries within Falmouth Arts Centre that I’m planning for this autumn. The show will open on Tuesday September 30th and close on Saturday October 11th. I thought it would be of interest to visitors to my website if I were to share some of my thoughts about what I currently aim to communicate through this series of paintings and charcoal drawings, ideas that will no doubt be developed and honed to something clearer and more specific as the time approaches.

The expression “ocean light” that has surfaced in my visual thinking lately of course grew out of what I find myself preoccupied with in much of my studio practice these days; the pervasive influence of the sea on the landscape that surrounds me here in the far west of Cornwall in the UK. There are different strands to this theme that I’m becoming aware of and some will no doubt be emphasised more than others in the final selection that I make. At the moment one point they all have in common is a sense of the ambient “ocean” light that, like many an artist before me, I am so often aware of here on the Penwith peninsula, this far westerly tip of Cornwall where my adopted home town of St Just is located.

The physical conditions that give rise to this phenomenon aren’t hard to spot. There are high places in Penwith where you can trace the line of the sea’s horizon around an angle of nearly 300 degrees and so often, if you stop to think about it, it’s as if you were all but surrounded by a giant mirror laid on the surface of the earth. So my guess is that the light bounces off this giant reflector and in combination with atmospheric reflection becomes this ambience that bathes the coastal forms here. Remember that in places the northwesterly coast and Mounts Bay are barely 5 or 6 miles apart. So it’s hardly surprising that, from some vantage points and at certain times of day and season, this phenomenon appears to penetrate well inland to the extent that the whole peninsula has about it an almost magical luminosity. I’m sure there are many places around the world where something similar happens. 

So what, you may say! Well, to a painter for whom the experience of colours interacting on each other is like a drug, such ambient light is a gift from the gods! This is because, as those pioneers of colour theory such as Itten and Albers realized, the closer the tonal range (and ambient light has such a generalised range) the more that the apparently internal glow of colours is generated when carefully chosen combinations of mixed hue are placed side by side. This vibrancy within the world of a painting in turn becomes for me a celebration of the ocean light.

I’m sure I’ll have more thoughts on the significance of all of this as showtime approaches. Enough from me for now. How about you? Any thoughts? Do any of my ramblings resonate with what happens visually or around the influence of the sea for you?

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In this post click on the blue words next to each example to go to the relevant place on the website. To return from there click on the words referring this blog entry.

An aspect of painting and drawing that I wanted to write about and invite your comments on is the whole business of shape and direction in both picture formats and forms within compositions. This is something I’m very aware of with my own work but I suspect it’s important to a great many artists.

For example I find that, for me, the shapes of picture formats influence the way I read them.

A vertical rectangle  hints at reading down or up the picture which can enhance the feeling of the energy of shapes grouped within it.

Likewise a markedly horizontal format   seems to invite reading across the picture as in a panorama, so much so that with very long pieces I’ve often broken such surfaces down into square sections partly to slow up the eye, partly to simplify shapes and allow for variations on a theme from one square to the next.

Then there’s the square format itself. To me equal height and width imply something very resolved and settled, a quality I sometimes use

 to suggest contained stresses   , sometimes to underline a feeling of balance   already inherent in the shapes within the picture.

An interesting variation occurs when a square is tilted onto one of its corners.

Now its sides all become 45 degree angles often suggesting heightened tension and giving impact to the forms contained by them, either highlighting their stresses   or livening up more low key elements such as seascape shapes around a horizon line  .

Such up-ended square compositions make a strong visual statement on any wall due to their marked diagonals whilst these diagonal sides also make them look very much at home hanging on a staircase.  

Within any picture format the way that forms pick up on an implied geometry of proportion  is also something that fascinates me and that I often use.

Another quality I like to use is what I think of as the dovetailing  of shapes with other shapes. 

To me all such phenomena create visual rhythms which complement the colours and tones I’m using and together with them can give me a sense of the piece having a life of its own, re-presenting something I’ve seen in a way that may refer to a specific place or time but aims at a celebration of it rather than a slavish imitation.

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 The latest addition to my New Work page is the most recent in a series of what may seem to be oddly shaped paintings:

Some others have included chevron shaped compositions (which are simply square canvases that hang from one corner) like Leaving harbour, Newlyn, multiple chevrons (Kanorian Enev at Morvah) and triangular pieces (Stream flowing to the sea, Cot Valley). These are just some recent examples. In fact I’ve been experimenting with a wide variety of different formats since my student days in Italy when the altarpieces and sections of fresco decoration I came across in museums,  churches and monastries inspired me in that direction. The shape of the painting surface became an important part of the idea behind each of my pictures.

In every case there is a good reason for my choice of shape. Whether it’s one of the more unusual ones mentioned above or whether I choose to use a less unusual vertical or horizontal rectangle of particular dimensions, the choice will have arisen from something in the visual encounter that led to the impetus to create the piece.

In the case of the Cornish tree on the slopes of Tregeseal Valley the reason for the trapezoid shape arose from wanting to emphasise the way the tree has developed at this strange angle due to the saltiness of the wind from the sea. I also wanted to set this against the long diagonals of the hedges and valley shapes from lower left to upper right while keeping the contrasting lines of buildings and some of the distant field boundaries more abrupt for contrast. 

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(click on the thumbnail for a much clearer view)

This painting is based on the second in the cycle of Cornish Miracle plays from the fifteenth century known as The Ordinalia. It was performed in the Plen-an-Gwary, ( playing place ) in the centre of St. Just-in-Penwith in August / September 2001 by The Ordinalia Company, made up of the people of St. Just and the surrounding area (and a core production team of professional theatre practitioners). The third play in the cycle, The Resurrection, was later presented in August 2002 and THE FULL CYCLE in August 2004.

In the spring of 2007 the Ordinalia’s much loved director Dominic Knutton tragically died and it has been proposed that the hut adjoining the Plen, which was used as a vital backstage area for the productions, should be renamed the KNUTTON hut. The St Just community, represented by the town trust, aims to purchase this structure and develop it as part of the facilities at the Plen. To this end we are raising money so that the trust can buy the hut and the land that it is built on and the total proceeds from the sale of the painting have been donated to this appeal.

Your comments are always welcome and this is how to add them. Simply hover the mouse arrow over either the title of a “post” at the top or over the words ”no comments” (if there aren’t yet any) or the word “comments” (if there are). The arrow in each case turns into a pointing hand showing you can click to go further. This brings you to a page where you can add your comment under what I’ve written and then submit it. I look forward to hearing from you. 

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You may have noticed that among my recent pieces are some that use piano hinges to join two canvases together. These valley pictures are literally folded landscapes, the latest in a genre that I developed around 2003 when I was working towards a show called Valleys and Horizons at the Mariners Gallery in St Ives. Why folded? Two reasons really – it all began with quite a large screen made up of several canvases that I intended to be free standing (I’ve long been an admirer of the so called “Golden screens” of Japan). Then I discovered that the shallow space created by the angle between the canvases somehow gave a boost to the painted space of the picture and that this worked best when the image was one of enclosed landscape space as in a valley. This valley image then became the raison d’etre for using this genre and I started making smaller ones that were designed to either hang on a wall or be free standing on a table or shelf. The new ones that use piano hinges are just the latest generation of such works. An example of these earlier two part images is Cot valley folded diptych.