North Sea Radio Orchestra: 'I A Moon'

Every now and then I encounter a piece of music that does everything I’d want it to on first hearing but continues to repay repeated listens.  ‘I a Moon’ - the third album by North Sea Radio Orchestra, is one of them.

It’s one of those I stumbled over via the now familiar, ‘customers who bought this also bought…’ and “I wonder if it’s on Spotify?” route - a process familiar to most music consumers these days.  Without getting into a debate about its beneficial or detrimental effects on working musicians, it certainly brought this little gem to my attention sooner than might have happened otherwise and led me to pay for the physical artefact not long after.  At this stage I can honestly say, “why wasn’t I told sooner?”

How to describe the music?  Like so much stuff these days it combines several disparate but somehow compatible elements in an attempt to produce something greater than the sum of it’s parts.  In this case, it sounds like a small group of classically trained chamber musicians, (led by the husband and wife team of Craig and Sharron Fortnam), who are equally interested in Minimalism, pastoral electronica and the British folk tradition.  On several tracks Sharron sings some of the purest, loveliest female vocals I’ve heard in ages, (reminiscent of Kate Bush but without either histrionics or simpering).  Apart from the relatively modest and beautifully integrated use of electronics and organ, everything else is acoustic with instrumentation including violin, viola, cello, clarinet, bassoon and sparing percussion.  The whole thing is clear as a bell and effectively uncluttered.  Instead of trying to prove how clever they are through complexity or deliberate difficulty, these musicians have chosen to demonstrate just how intelligently they can combine a few simple and clearly defined ingredients into a beautifully judged whole.

Any detailed analysis of how this music is constructed, whilst instructive, should be at the service of investigating the intensity of emotional response it elicits.  Above all, it’s the sheer Britishness of the thing that is the most affecting.  It’s steeped in those qualities of spartan romanticism and nuanced melancholy that are the specialities of these islands but, whilst essentially pastoral in outlook, it avoids being at all cloying or hackneyed.  Doubtless there is a powerful nostalgic impulse at work but it’s more like a sincere yearning for a personal past when things just seemed to make more sense, than for an idealised, imagined bucolic golden age.

In essence, this is because the disparate musical strands are more than mere bolt-on stylistic tropes.  Instead, they are cleverly integrated into compositional schemes which are unafraid to display their nuts and bolts, (and wooden wedges), within each piece.  The eight-minute mini-epic that is ‘Heavy Weather' demonstrates this admirably.  The piece combines a vocal duet simultaneously reminiscent of nursery rhyme, folk canon and sea shanty with instrumental passages that recall the pastoralism of Vaughan Williams before erupting into something akin to a village green silver band.  Yet the whole thing hangs on the clear framework of a simple piano figure that introduces and repeats throughout the whole piece.  As the distinct musical layers subside in the last few bars we are left with an electronic coda that resembles nothing more than Terry Riley idly noodling a repeated phrase of organ Minimalism.  It’s a clear nod to the album's structural, avant-garde underpinnings.

The following ‘Berliner Luft’ pushes this compositional angularity further to the fore.  Complete with its Modernism-invoking German title it sets off at a trot, employing endlessly repeating angular patterns of strings, woodwinds and electronics.  Yet, lying in wait at the heart of the piece are layers of violin that seem destined to soar above the Malvern Hills on a summer’s day.  The piece could easily soundtrack a documentary film about a country postman on his rounds.

Mention must also be made of ‘The Earth Beneath Our Feet’ a track so insanely yet modestly beautiful that it has me on the verge of tears each time I hear it.  Over a simple accompaniment of guitar and strings Sharron sings,

“And so, when you come around

we’ll open all the windows

let the evening out,

we’ll be sitting in a row

looking over England

watch the evening go".

Now, who doesn’t want a memory like that?

Finally, is it just me - or are the name of the ensemble and the C.D. package not just perfect signifiers of all of that?  There’s just the right degree of allusion in the name to the shipping forecast, public service broadcasting and to the bleaker stretches of British coastline – of trawlers out at night in rough seas searching for the B.B.C. frequencies.  Furthermore, I swear that artwork just comes straight off the forgotten box lid of some quaintly futuristic game from my childhood.

It hardly amounts to a critical approach but I’ve played ‘I a Moon’ relentlessly over the last few weeks and I just can’t find anything I don’t like.

Completed Painting: 'Asylum 1'

There is a danger that, in the midst of an apparently successful run of work, you may become repetitive or complacent.  Without vigilance, the excitement of an initial breakthrough can quickly settle into a familiar comfort zone of predictable moves resulting in diminishing returns.

'Asylum 1', Acrylics & Paper Collage on Panel, 100 cm X 100 cm, 2011

Having completed the ‘Safe From Harm 1’ triptych over the summer, I began work on another one metre square panel, conscious that I needed it to contain a slightly different challenge this time round.  I had been recently looking at the work of Zak Prekop and had become intrigued by his essentially ‘all-over’ model of painting with its various strategies for getting from one side of a canvas to the other using purely abstract, formal devices.  It’s not so usual to see this kind of formalist abstraction nowadays and it cheers me that Prekop engages with the Twentieth Century Modernist drama of pure shapes interacting with the picture plane whilst producing work that looks completely contemporary.  Once upon a time it might have become my own agenda but, as my own work has developed, it has filled up with content and ideas from  beyond the confines of a framing edge.  However, the fact cannot be ignored that the various layers of emotional, conceptual and textual meaning in my paintings are still largely organised through the formal visual language of edges meeting, areas extending across a plane, shapes overlapping and paint declaring its physicality on flat surfaces.

Zak Prekop, 'Incomplete Division (Red)', 2010

Of particular interest to me when developing the composition of ‘Asylum 1’ was Prekop’s habitual use of repeating patterns or networks of marks across an entire picture plane to unify fields of looser paint or torn paper.  Even where these floated networks fade in and out there is a sense of ‘all-overness’ about them.  I had already decided on the title and primary theme of ‘Asylum’ and came to realise that a diamond fence pattern would provide valuable thematic clues whilst serving as just such a unifying field.  The latter role became increasingly important in a composition that was becoming busier and potentially more chaotic than the preceding ones.  On the actual panel the motif was applied as a collaged paper cut-out that was masked and painted over and, whilst not totally happy with the paint application, I do think it largely serves the purpose as intended.

Zak Precop, 'Untitled (Blue)', 2010

Asylum 1 has a composition that was eventually resolved by adding more and more elements.  There is usually a process of distillation at some stage where certain things get discarded and the whole composition is boiled down to a kind of unity.  This time, stuff just kept piling into the preparatory study before I was really satisfied.  The red tag graffito, (again, derived from an original doodle by my colleague work Dianne), was already quite elaborate in the study but just kept extending further across the actual painting as it neared completion.  The elements of black, white and yellow text also became more complex at a fairly late stage both formally and in terms of their implied meaning.

This visual complexity could be seen as a reflection of the multiple themes that run through the painting.  At the time of its gestation the novelty of a recently formed Tory-Liberal coalition was a major preoccupation of the news and comment media.  As well as providing a useful compositional element, the small black X in the upper-right section could be interpreted as a voter’s mark in reference to this.  No matter how history records current events, my rather facile reaction was that ‘the lunatics have taken over the asylum’.  In actual fact, the recent political change felt more like one set of lunatics handing over to another as the asylum slowly subsided into a swamp and the population searched vainly for care in the community.  It had been my intention to attempt a palette based on the three primary colours as a purely technical challenge.  Besides the optical impact of their direct juxtaposition, it occurred to me that, regarded emblematically, they represent the three main political factions in Britain.

Immigration was another frequent topic of public debate at the time and one that seems to come under greater scrutiny from the political Right.  It led me to muse on the distinctions between and definition of terms like ‘economic migrant’ and ‘asylum seeker’.   Someone’s sense of security, opportunity, affluence and freedom in a given location are, I guess, dependant on what they have experienced elsewhere.  The impression that your own country is going to Hell in a handcart can be thrown into question by reports of others eager to be allowed in.  Could it be that one person’s madhouse or prison is another person’s place of safety?  And do those who relocate to make a new life come to revise their own definition of ‘Asylum’ after a while?  Of course, there are also those who, however misguidedly, would assert that it is the competing needs and cultural values of those incomers that can make a once, (relatively), secure society seem less stable.  The wire fence motif is a definite pointer to all of this.  Such fences can protect, detain, imprison, quarantine, restrict and segregate in equal measure depending on the context and viewpoint.  And it is in their very nature to allow a clear view of that which is denied.

The subsidiary text elements had been relatively random and disconnected in the study for this painting.  In the light of these meditations they came to represent fragments of lyrics from the patriotic anthem ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ - itself associated with the British Tory party.  It is ironic that, despite the jingoism and imperialism traditionally associated with the song, a ‘Land of Hope’ that functions as a ‘Mother of the Free’ might be exactly what many new arrivals are seeking.  In reality it may be a moot point whether hope, glory and freedom are still seen as key features of British society.  

It is not my intention to present any one particular agenda through these paintings.  Rather, they seek to present, (quite obliquely), resonant words or phrases in the hope of stimulating internal debate and a consideration of multiple possible interpretations.  The paintings may contain numerous questions but relatively few answers - if any.

'Safe From Harm 1': A Closer View

My previous post, 'Once Upon A Time In The West', filled in some of the background and personal history behind my 'Safe From Harm 1' triptych and an image of the three panels when hung as a single piece.  Here's a chance to see them individually at a larger scale. 

'Safe From Harm' ('Safe'), 2011, Acrylics & Paper Collage on Panel, 150 cm X 50 cm

'Safe From Harm' ('From'), 2011, Acrylics & Paper Collage on Panel, 150 cm X 50 cm

'Safe From Harm' ('Harm'), 2011, Acrylics & Paper Collage on Panel, 150 cm X 50 cm

Completed Triptych: 'Safe From Harm 1'

I’m sure a lot of amateur artists share the elusive dream of making a living from the production of their work alone.  Of course, for so many the reality is actually one of fitting our art practice around the demands of a day job.  It would be disingenuous not to admit that one of the big obvious advantages of working in a school is the generous holidays.  There’s no substitute for a solid block of painting time and this Summer I was able to really capitalise on it and get stuck in straight away.  With a chunk of available time, I decided to carry out an idea for a piece comprising multiple separate elements.

'Safe From Harm', 2011, Acrylics & Paper Collage on 3 Panels,
150 cm X 50 cm (Each Panel), 150 cm X 200 cm (Overall)

‘Safe From Harm 1’ is a triptych of narrow, one and a half metre high, vertical panels - each bearing one word of the title.  The phrase came via the Massive Attack song of the same title.  Over the years critics have waxed lyrical on the quality and significance of their music, particularly of those first two albums from the early 90’s and I was certainly sold on it from first hearing.  There is a small personal connection for me as well.  I lived in Bristol between 1981 and 1987 and during that time I witnessed the disturbances in St. Pauls and paid several visits to the city’s infamous, racially mixed, (and often fairly heavy), Dugout Club.  Both were important ingredients of what became known as ‘The Bristol Sound’.

I have distinct memories of hearing early hip hop records for the first time down at the Dugout and on several occasions I believe they were played by the nascent Wild Bunch Sound System - the collective from which Massive Attack was to later emerge.  During my first term as a student my daily cycle journey into college took me past the Coach House studios where their first album – ‘Blue Lines’, (including ‘Safe From Harm’), was to be recorded.  Towards the end of my time in the city I shared a shabby house on Richmond Terrace in Clifton.  Just round the corner was one of the first bits of proper ‘Wild Style’ graffiti I ever saw - courtesy of Massive Attack’s 3D.  I was a naïve, white, middle class art student from the East Midlands but even I could tell something was happening.

'3D', 3D (Robert Del Naja), Clifton, Bristol

For a detailed survey of Bristol’s eclectic and pioneering music scene, try reading ‘Straight Outta Bristol: "Massive Attack", "Portishead", "Tricky" and the Roots of Trip Hop’ by Phil Johnson [1].  My first contact with it all was with the angular, white funk/punk aesthetic of bands like Pigbag, Rip Rig and Panic, Automatic Dlamini and The Pop Group.  Occasional trips to St Pauls and surrounding areas, visits to The Dugout and the general rise in consciousness around post-riot Bristol soon made me much more aware of the deeper, blacker, strands of Soul, Reggae and Hip Hop permeating the musical culture of a city that was surprisingly ghettoised.

Others have noted just how dramatically the dread mood of the deprived zones east of the city centre was juxtaposed against the complacency of affluent, trendy, (white), areas like Clifton and Redland, just up the road.  The location of The Dugout placed it centrally between the two worlds making it an obvious place for curious students to come face to face with a less privileged but inherently creative, alternative scene.  I also have a cherished memory of venturing into a boozer somewhere in Montpellier one night to hear a DJ entertain a room of middle-aged and elderly people, many of whom I guessed to be first generation Caribbean immigrants.  Once it became obvious we were there for genuine reasons, we were treated to an evening of music that sounded as near to ‘the real thing’ as anything I’ve witnessed. 

     

By the time ‘Blue Lines’ came out in 1991 I had relocated to Leicester, (a city with its own rather different multi-cultural dynamic), but it certainly captured the smoked out, soulful, tense sometimes threatening vibe of parts of inner-city Bristol as I remembered it.  ‘Safe From Harm’ has endured in my mind as a resonant phrase for twenty years, as has my love of the particular song.  Shara Nelson’s vocal evokes a perfect blend of vulnerability and implied threat and captures that yearning for safety that all modern urban dwellers crave to some degree in the face of,

“Midnight rockers

City slickers

gunmen and maniacs…”

And surely, there can be no better evocation of urban paranoia than 3D’s laconically rapped interjection,

“I was lookin’ back to see if you were lookin’ back at me

To see me lookin’ back at you”.

In the intervening years we have all become familiar with the style of graffiti once known as ‘Wild Style’.  Calligraphic tagging has become a ubiquitous form of territorial marking and now constitutes just another layer of visual texture within the overall urban environment, - a kind of visual noise in essence.  Amongst the other textual strata to which my eye is constantly drawn are various forms of official or formal signage and the ragged, disintegrating layers of fly posters which accrete on unsupervised city surfaces.  All three were combined as sources for the painted triptych.

    

One particular observed example provided a specific source and was to dictate the tall, thin format of each individual panel.  Dotted around a major road junction close to my home, are a series of huge streetlights with substantial square pillars at street level.  As blank, available space these are routinely tagged and I became particularly attracted to the way one writer had scrolled his text down the narrow, vertical space.  Once augmented by a small fly poster, the subject became irresistible and was quickly photographed for use as the starting point of my composition. 

 Sketchbook studies were evolved to incorporate my three words, (conveniently of equal length), and then reproduced pretty faithfully at full scale.  The techniques I used were essentially those of recent paintings but with a more overt use of collage in the backgrounds.  I incorporated actual fragments of salvaged fly posters here along with photocopies and individually cut out characters.

[1]:  Phil Johnson, ‘Straight Outta Bristol: “Massive Attack”, “Portishead”, “Tricky” And The Roots Of Trip Hop’, 1997, Coronet Books.

Completed Painting: 'Home 1'

When I’d finished work on ‘Together 1’ and ‘Broken 1’ I felt pretty positive about the results and was keen to maintain the momentum.  When not working on the actual panels, the ideas were flowing in my sketchbook and I had a number of possible starting points for the next piece. 

Home 1, 2011, Acrylics & Paper Collage on Panel, 100cm X 100 cm

In the event, ‘Home 1’ started as a possible commission.  I find the whole business of being commissioned a little tricky.  If I’m on a roll with my work it can seem like an interruption or a distraction unless the request is for something genuinely interesting or that fits into that general flow.  It’s doubly awkward if the commissioner is unfamiliar with your current output.  Maybe all those years of fulfilling client briefs in the commercial sector made me a little selfish because these days I often feel that ‘it’s my time now’.  On the other hand, it’s always nice to be asked. 

There’s nothing worse than doing a painting reluctantly so I tried to produce a working study for something that would remain true to my vision but with a theme that could allow for a positive interpretation and a consciously heightened palette.  I’d had the theme of ‘home’ in mind for some time and it seemed to evoke a variety of possible associations, and allowed for the possibility of an up-beat interpretation.  

Much of the visual source material came from a specific location.  This was a slight departure from the previous paintings although the development of a composition through experimental collage was essentially the same.  I’d already taken some photos of a fantastic dilapidated boarded shop front on Nottingham’s Mansfield Road.  The hoarding is so wilfully badly painted that it amounts to some sort of found Abstract Expressionist colour field.  I was also fascinated by how much beautiful visual incident could occur within something essentially blank and monochrome and I loved that stylised graffiti pictogram as soon as I saw it.  As a subject it speaks to me on various levels, not least of which are the themes of security, shelter and of people (or buildings), trying to ‘hang on in there’ in a tough situation.

The commission was withdrawn at the finished study stage, (which wasn’t a total surprise).  Of course, it could mean the painting’s crap or simply be a matter of taste.  Smugly, I choose to be a little pleased that maybe my current stuff has a bit too much edge to be part of the background for someone’s décor scheme.  Do I want to make comfortable or comforting paintings?  Just at the moment - probably not.  The truth is most likely somewhere in the middle, as usual.  Luckily, this was no reason not to complete the painting.

I was pleased that I managed to make some kind of sense from a fairly mad palette that had evolved out of the original proposal for the commission. There are two pairs of complementary contrasts going on and several colours which are saturated, close in tone and potentially over-competitive.  As usual in such a situation, it was the tonal contrasts and less saturated passages around them that lent the thing some coherence.  The other challenge I faced was to devise a composition based around a word with only four characters.  Initial attempts were too regular and static until I recognised the need to vary the scale and style of each letter more dramatically.  I managed to preserve some sense of the wonderful, wretched paint application on that Nottingham shop front and it’s a source I can imagine returning to in the future - perhaps to explore the variation within a single colour aspect more fully.  The little graffiti pictogram was eventually developed into something rather different, serving both as an M character and a house/home symbol, whilst retaining its linear quality.

The heart motif was a last minute addition to activate what had turned out, at full scale, to be a slightly slack area in the composition.  It was inspired by a charming little fragment of graffiti on a door at work that always catches my eye.  It also sets up a pretty corny joke.  That's O.K., I'd already embraced the slightly ‘rinky-dink’ feel of the painting and sometimes corny is good.

Completed Paintings: 'Together 1' & 'Broken 1'

It’s never easy to evaluate one’s own work but sometimes you have a fairly strong instinct about these things.  Looking back at the paintings I’ve produced this year I’m probably happier with them than just about anything else I’ve made for a long time, (hence the existence of this blog as I noted in my introductory post).  At very least they represent a certain distillation of various themes, ideas and visual stimuli that have preoccupied me for some time.  They are also the result of a small but significant change in my general working method for producing paintings – one that has allowed me to work faster and with greater confidence.

'Together 1', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Panel, 100 cm X 100 cm, 2011

Mel, 2010, Beatriz Milhazes

‘Together 1’ was the first painting to be completed this year and was definitely something of a breakthrough,  (there's a larger image of it on my preceding post).  It's made from a combination of collaged paper, (including photocopies and tissue) and acrylic paints.  As well as Artist’s Liquid Acrylic there are acrylic decorator’s paints in there too and several litres of P.V.A adhesive to bind it all together.  Whilst paint was applied directly to the surface with brushes knives and spreaders there are also passages formed from skins of dried acrylic. This method has intrigued me for a while, having seen it in the work of Beatriz Milhazes amongst others.  The black X symbol, hazard-stripe motif, R character and large red graffito were all largely produced that way.  After a little experimentation I found it pretty simple to build up layers of acrylic on sheet polythene and peel it off when dry.  This could be cut or torn into shape and collaged onto the surface.  I’ve habitually used collage techniques over the years and I’m pleased to have arrived at a point where they are combining in equilibrium with areas of directly applied paint.

I was determined to work on a reasonably ambitious scale and the 'in your face' nature of the image seemed to demand it anyway.  At a metre square it's hardly of mural proportions but is about at the limit of what will comfortably go up the narrow stairs to my 'studio'.  This is an issue as I paint on rigid M.D.F. so there's no option to remove and roll a canvas for transportation.  On the other hand, the board provides a nice solid support for all those layers pasted on top.  Prior to this most of my finished pieces had been relatively small.  Having the freedom to move my hand and arm over a wider arc certainly made painting more fluent.

I’ll give more insights into sources, themes and possible readings for these paintings at a later date.  Suffice it to say for now, “Together” is a phrase that’s been bandied about a lot this year by our lords and masters with reference to what, on a bad day, looks like the possible “collapse of Western Capitalism”.  It’s funny how they suddenly want to share…  It seemed important that the component characters and motifs should appear to originate from a range of official, semi-formal and ‘street’ sources.

I developed the dazed rat motif from a combination of found sources.  It seemed ideal as an allusion to a population trying to thrive through expediency in a bruising environment.  I’m sure we could discuss at length how, as a species, they survive on crumbs from the table, live all around us in invisible squalor and occasionally have to abandon sinking ships.  Actually, rats are a pretty common motif in much street art, running rampant through the oeuvre of Banksy, Blek Le Rat and others.  I guess I was alluding to that too.

          

Banksy

Blek Le Rat

Having completed ‘Together 1’ over a period of about six weeks, I launched straight into the next one, titled ‘Broken 1’.  One reason for ‘Together’ feeling like a breakthrough was the way it was planned.  For a long time my habit had been to allow a work to find itself through the process of its production by capitalising on accidents and chance events.  It relates to that “sum of destructions” quote of Picasso’s [1] or the existential creative struggle of people like Giacometti and Auerbach.  It’s all very heroic but one danger of ‘not knowing what the work will look like until it does’ is that it can make a fetish of frustration.  In those conditions successful resolution can become mistrusted if it arrives at all.  I think I was just keen to produce something a little less ‘wrangled’.

‘Together 1’ was derived from a sketchbook study that just seemed to work as it stood.  I’d already wrested a coherent image out of randomness and had my moment of struggle through a process of painted collage on the page.  It seemed perfectly reasonable to reproduce it at full size with only minor changes and minimal further development.  It made for a pretty enjoyable painting experience in which the main challenge was the technical one of finding appropriate translations from study to panel.  ‘Broken 1’ was produced in the same way.

Broken 1,  Acrylics & Paper Collage, 100 cm X 100 cm,  2011

All of the methods of collage and paint application already outlined were employed once again.  In addition, ‘Broken 1’ includes a large zone of thick, unctuous, yellow acrylic.  Trowelling that on was one of the most joyful bits of paint moving I’ve done in ages.  In both these paintings, my search for a heightened colour palette led me to include some fluorescent colour.  In this case there was a challenge in getting the fluoro yellow graffiti motif to sit comfortably over an already heightened yellow ground.

Thanks should also go to my work colleague Dianne for her original doodle of the red graffiti tag.  I’ve generally found it hard to consciously summon the calligraphic spontaneity necessary in such motifs.  Somehow, using someone else’s handwriting is always more successful.  Once again, the title arrived courtesy of the news media, 'Broken' being an oft-used descriptor of our current society.  Of course, a lot of other things can also be prefaced with 'Broken'.  Amongst them I might include 'Promises', 'English', 'Spirit', 'Homes', 'Bones' and 'Dreams'.

[1] “Formerly pictures used to move towards completion in progressive stages. Each day would bring something new. A picture was a sum of additions. With me, picture is a sum of destructions. I do a picture, then I destroy it. But in the long run nothing is lost; the red that I took away from one place turns up somewhere else”.

Boisgeloup, winter 1934, quoted in Letters of the great artists – from Blake to Pollock -, Richard Friedenthal, Thames and Hudson, London, 1963, p. 256 (translation Daphne Woodward) 

Well, It Is The Twenty First Century After All

As a persistent late adopter, why would I want to join (seemingly) the rest of the world and acquire an on-line presence for the first time?  And given that’s exactly what I appear to be doing, what possible purpose could this blog serve?  If a huge proportion of the world population now converse and display themselves routinely through the phone lines and the ether and on glowing screens of all shapes and sizes, what on Earth could I show or tell you that you haven’t already seen and heard before?  Well, we can always ask “why?” and I certainly have made a habit of that over the years.  Perhaps sometimes it’s better to ask “why not?” and take the trouble to actually contribute rather than merely observing.  Maybe, for once and at long last, I feel like I too have something that might just be worth showing you and telling you about.  Primarily, it’s because of these paintings I’ve been doing.

Together 1,  Acrylics & Paper Collage on Panel, 100 cm X 100 cm, 2011

Like all small kids I always made pictures but then I noticed I was happy to keep going when the other kids got bored and adults started telling me I was quite good at it.  I certainly loved doing it and when I learnt there were people called ‘Artists’ I decided to be one of those and not a Fireman after all, (that was only ever because I liked copying the pictures from my book about fire engines anyway).  I kept doing it and finding out more about it and it became my ambition to go to Art School.  I did that and got my piece of paper to prove it…and then somehow it all got away from me and, for ages, I couldn’t quite remember what I was supposed to be doing. 

I was lucky enough to find a steady creative job that paid my bills for years, so I hung on to a paintbrush, (and picked up other tools along the way). I made and painted things for shops and museums and theme parks that other people wanted, and learnt a lot of useful technical stuff in the process.  Despite all that, I always had a sense there was something I’d neglected to do and eventually I decided there should be more of the things I wanted made too.  Hence, for over a decade now, I’ve been trying to work out just what they might look like and what they might mean.  I made various guesses that resulted in some finished pieces but never fully convinced me.  Now, for the present at least, I think I might know what I want.  And furthermore, I think I might know enough to tell some other people, (or actually, the rest of the planet, as we’ve already established).

All year I’ve been working on a new series of paintings and loving it and feeling that sometimes I even know how to do it.  I still need a day job but I devote much of my spare time and mental capacity to it and now I remember what it was I should have been doing all along.  I’ve got a small stack of paintings that I’d actually cross a gallery to look at and I want it to become a larger stack as quickly as possible.  Then maybe I'll invite other people to cross a gallery to look at them.  They’re all things that exist purely on their own terms and for the sole reason that I wanted them to, so now it’s time for them to leave the safety of my spare room and try for another life as physical artifacts and/or glowing images out there in the world.  On the brink of my 50^th year, at a time when the 21^st Century seems like a pretty scary place to get old in, I can’t actually think of anything else that makes so much sense to me or that I’d rather be doing with my time.

Inevitably then, a lot of what I post here will be to do with the artworks I make - as I make them.  Also, until there are enough of them to actually fill a room, this is an obvious way for me to let folks see for themselves.  However, I’ve also come to recognise that the whole ‘Artistic Process’ thing soon becomes about how you locate your life within the random complexity of the world and how you try to get a handle on it all on different levels.  Perhaps the ritualised behaviour and routines of producing artworks is actually about creating a formal arena in which all those sensations, observations, emotions and reactions can be processed and rehearsed without the author becoming totally overwhelmed. Maybe, only some of us need to do it to stay happy but, if you were unsure, I'd recommend it.  The finished pieces might be just the physical manifestations of something much bigger, like post-it notes for experience.  For that reason it’s my hope that this blog will end up covering a range of other loosely related topics that seem important at any given time during their creation.  Some of it will be about stuff that feeds into the paintings consciously or subconsciously.  Some of it may be about the cultural or artistic expressions of others.  The rest will be things that just seem important or worthy of comment, posted here in the hope that someone else thinks so too.  I suppose you’ll have to judge for yourself, and maybe let me know…