Completed Painting: 'Map 1'

'Map 1', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Panel, 60 cm X 60 cm, 2015

It feels good to open 2015 with a newly completed painting.  I’ve had several pieces simultaneously on the go over the last month, and ‘Map 1’ is the first to reach some form of completion.  ‘Completion’ is, of course, a tenacious term when applied to the painting process, - mostly it just feels like the various levels of this image have reached some degree of equilibrium, and that there’s nothing to be gained by fiddling with it any further.

Anyone familiar with my recent work may recognise various customary elements, - not least a heavy reliance on collage techniques, the layering, overlapping and slurring together of different statements, a certain vestigial reliance on geometric compositional formality, (reasonably submerged here), and the inclusion of more or less fragmented textual elements, (pointing towards a variety of soft conceptualism).  However, there are also one or two newer developments in this painting, indicating that it’s the first piece consciously produced for the ‘Mental Mapping’ exhibition that I’m planning with Andrew Smith, in Rugby, this summer.

Having agreed to exhibit together, and been lucky enough to secure a slot at Rugby Art Gallery& Museum’s Floor One Gallery, Andrew and I were faced with the need to come up with an (ideally) interesting title for the show, in order to complete the necessary paperwork.  My initial assumption was that my contribution to the show would largely comprise of pre-existing work, but as soon as the ‘Mental Mapping’ label emerged from our email-assisted brainstorming, it quickly suggested possibilities for new work in my mind.  With approximately six months remaining, I’ve no idea how much completely new stuff I’ll actually be able to include, but I’m determined it should be as much as possible.  For the record, ‘Mental Mapping’ was a phrase of Andrew’s that immediately struck a chord with my own existing preoccupations, but felt ambiguous enough to allow for a number of possible interpretations and to allow each of us to come at things from our own direction.  

Anyway, the obvious connection between this image, and the ‘MM’ theme is the conscious inclusion of an element of cartography, - the map in question being a section of Leicester’s street plan.  I did initially toy with possible higher-tech methods of applying linear maps to a painting.  However, wanting to simply get on without too much expense or complexity, I eventually just resorted to my old scene-painter’s methods, - utilising a combination of photocopying, overhead projection, manual tracing, and a load of masking tape.  The results are, I feel, ‘accurate enough’.

Junction of Northgate St/Sanvey Gate/Soar Lane, Leicester, January 2015

More specifically, the street map includes an actual site from which I have scavenged fallen or torn advertising posters, fragments of which are in turn collaged into the painting itself.  In this case, the hoardings are sited on the crossroads junction of Soar Lane/Sanvey Gate/Northgate Street, (just north west of the city centre), as depicted close to the centre of the composition.

'Consumed 1', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Panel, 100 cm X 100 cm, 2014

This use of torn posters in building up of seemingly dilapidated surfaces has been going on in my work for a while, and I really enjoy the scope it offers for creative serendipity, happy accidents, and found texts and colours.  Equally important are the sly references to photographic reproduction and printing technology implied in the small passages of Ben-Day or Halftone dots that remain visible.  The juxtaposition of consumer-capitalist fantasy/spectacle with the physical realities of entropy, transformation and material fatigue is something I find everywhere in my Urban surroundings.  It remains a regular theme in much of what I do.

Junction Of Northgate St/Sanvey Gate/Soar Lane, Leicester, January 2015

In even broader terms, I suppose that what I do is really just an attempt to unify the idea of material space with that of a ‘Written City’ of signs, messages, labels, clues, texts (and resulting associations), of every sort.  In recent paintings, the textual fragments included in paintings have alluded primarily to my thoughts while passing through these environments.  In this new painting, they relate to actual texts found within the specific site itself.  I intend that these new ‘Map’ paintings should all include some such element of easily decipherable, non-anagramatic quotation.  In fact, I’ve already cheated a little by slightly adapting a found legend here, but I couldn’t resist the ‘Primesight/site’ ambiguity, and the further layer of self-reflexivity it affords.

It’s also my intention that the palette of these ‘Map’ paintings should relate directly to some aspect of the source location.  In this case, The predominance of sky blue is a reference to the customary backing colour of most printed advertising posters, (and it’s frequent emergence as soon as the paper becomes torn), but also to my memory-impression of clear skies above what is essentially an open site surrounded by mostly low-level structures.  After a period of working with fairly subdued, even monochromatic palettes, my current instinct is to reintroduce a little more heightened colour into proceedings.  That certainly seems to be the case with some of the paintings coming along in the wake of this one.

There should be several more ‘Map’ pieces reaching a conclusion fairly soon.  For now, whilst there are (as always), some aspects of this one that please me more than others, it does at least feel like a small evolutionary step on what went before.  Perhaps most importantly, it’s already suggesting possible new ways forward in the coming weeks.