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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 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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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.