Completed Painting: 'Vestige 4'

'Vestige 4', Acrylics, Paper Collage, Spray Enamel, French Polish, Pencil & Coloured Pencil
On Panel, 60 cm X 60 cm, 2016

We’re already into March, - which I find a bit scary; but at least it feels like I’ve made a reasonably energetic start to the year, artistically speaking.  There are a variety of creative strands I hope to follow this year, including more printing activity, (fairly soon, hopefully), and a proposed new collaborative project with fellow artist Andrew Smith, (into which we’re just starting to feel our way, at the moment).  However, so far, 2016’s most tangible results are in the form of painting, - a reminder that it remains at the core of my activities.

So, it’s pleasing to be able to reveal the fourth in my series of ‘Vestige’ pieces, entitled, (predictably enough), ‘Vestige 4’.  There’s little point in my alienating regular readers by repeating the same old stuff, each time I post one of these, - as the basic premise of the series remains essentially the same, from painting to painting.  If you’re a new visitor, you can catch up here, here, here, or here.

Just as with the previous three ‘Vestiges’, I embarked on ‘4’ with the intention of pulling the series in a new direction visually, only to discover that the finished painting actually resembles a gradual evolution more than a dramatic departure.  In fact, I’m now starting to realise how that ‘reach-exceeding-one's-grasp’ feeling is actually a key feature of the whole process I’ve embarked upon.  Nevertheless, I did at least manage to avoid just slipping back, by default, into yet another world of mid-grey.  This one deliberately introduces a slightly (and I do mean slightly) stronger element of actual colour, and much more dramatic   dark-light contrast.

Southwark, South London, 2011

It’s worth mentioning that the starting point for this one was a group of photographs I took on London’s South Bank, a few years ago, although I resisted the temptation to reproduce any single image too slavishly.  In fact, of the four ‘Vestiges’ so far produced, this might be the one I currently feel most favourably disposed towards.  Although it proved a bit intransigent during its slightly stop-start, early stages, - it actually came together rapidly and rather pleasingly, in the end.  I think I also managed to strike a reasonable balance between putting in the necessary labour to find a solution that was in there somewhere, - and keeping things just fresh and open enough in terms of the marks I was making.  If there was a danger of things getting a bit stodgy early on, - this time, the solution really was to just keep going.