Completed Painting: 'Untitled 2 (Constructed City)'

'Untitled 2 (Constructed City)', Acrylic & Collaged Screen Print on Panel,
30 cm x 30 cm, 2020

Here's the second painting to be completed as part of my 'Constructed City' project.  It's clearly a companion-piece to the one in my last post - being identical in scale, and very similar in composition and overall handling.  There's also a clear lineage between both these little paintings, and the paper-based studies and sketchbook collages that preceded them.

If this return to a rather methodical approach, and the fairly linear development that characterises it, suggest a degree of caution - it is at least bearing fruit.  And there is already some degree of new ground broken here (and also, a rather more overt element of pictorial risk-taking), in the form of the bright orange field which occupies the composition's central section.  Scraping fluorescent orange paint over much of the painting was the last significant action on this piece (barring a couple of minor additions), and was, inevitably, something of a make-or-break move.

But, as we all know, being prepared to kill one's darlings is a tried and tested principle (if not a cliche) of any creative endeavour.  In this case, it effectively dispelled any fears of having made the same painting twice, and also represented an element of sheer instinct intruding  into a process that had, as I've pointed out, been relatively tentative up to that point.  Taking that risk, and (I think) making a painting that is far more satisfying than it would have been otherwise, is a massive confidence-booster too.  That's important, not least in terms of what might follow.

This pulling back of the magician's curtain may be slightly more of an affectation than many viewers really seek, when looking at artwork - I'll accept.  However, I see no harm in asserting that most 'successful' artworks reach that state because the artist trusted a hunch, or went out on a limb at some point - rather than because they had predicted the exact consequences of each and every action.

Should anyone require it - there is a more literalist explanation for something that certainly didn't appear in any of the painting's preparatory images.  One prominent feature of the construction sites I've been photographing almost religiously for some time, is the swathing of their structural geometry in layers of tarpaulin and other gauzy screening materials.  Might this presage some ultimate magician's reveal of the completed edifice, on the part of the builders?  I'd love to believe so.  Certainly, there may be some PR-driven urge to suggest that such massive physical interventions into the urban landscape could be erected with the minimum of inconvenient 'process' or visual offence.  More prosaically though, we must also accept that, in the main, all this Christo-esque [1.] wrapping is a response to Health & Safety legislation.

West Leicester, March 2020

Trent Bridge, Nottingham, July 2019

What it does do, visually at least, is to create the delicious complex of interlocking grids and overlapping translucent veils of colour, to which my lens is repeatedly drawn.  In this case, it also takes-on the Hi-Vis hue of that familiar expanded plastic fencing mesh, which is similarly prevalent on the sites.  Even more tangentially - there might even be some suggested memory of the ruddy sunset I glimpsed through swathed scaffolding, at the turn of the year.

All these months of visiting and revisiting the same sites, with camera in hand, may seem a trifle obsessive to the bemused passer-by, and have certainly resulted in a challenge from over-enthusiastic security Job's-worths, on more than one occasion.  However, while it certainly involves the potential harvesting of specific source imagery, it's also about compiling a more generalised (and perhaps more lyrical) sense-impression of the chosen subject - on which one can draw in a more intuitive manner.  Just like this, in fact.

West Leicester, December 2019

Anyway, that's enough demystification for now - I think

[1.]:  It is with regret that I learned of the death of the artist, Christo Javajeff, aged 84 - even as I was writing this post.