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The commission was withdrawn at the finished study stage, (which wasn’t a total surprise).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.