Completed Painting: 'Shut 2'

'Shut 2', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Panel, 120 cm X 90 cm, 2012

I’ve just finished my latest painting, titled ‘Shut 2’.  It’s been a few weeks in production and a couple of significant events occurred since I posted about its preparatory development stages.  One of these was the ‘If a Picture Paints a Thousand Words…” exhibition in Birmingham in which I participated, as also discussed in recent posts.  I'm sure that the thought processes it triggered, and the potential of Birmingham to provide source material for future artworks, will percolate through next year’s work.

Study For 'Shut 2', Acrylics & Paper Collage
On Paper, 60 cm X 45 cm, 2012

Study For 'Shut 2', Acrylics & Paper Collage
On Paper, 60 cm X 40 cm, 2012

However, the origins of ‘Shut 2’ precede that show and it’s actually more revealing to relate it to another important influence, namely October’s visit to Walsall, (itself, a stone’s throw from Brum), to see Fiona Rae’s exhibition, - ‘Maybe You Can Live On The Moon In The Next Century’.  I had been thinking about Rae’s work as the idea for my painting emerged so the timing of the inspiring Walsall show was particularly fortuitous.  It’s no accident that, whilst continuing themes I’ve been exploring in paintings during 2012, this one draws consciously on certain aspects of Rae’s own visual vocabulary.

Fiona Rae, 'Moonlight Bunny Ranch',
Oil & Acrylic On Canvas, 2003

The painting’s origins lie in the photographic images of industrial steel shutters I’ve referred to repeatedly this year.  In this case, the individual subject was the same as the preceding ‘Shut 1' but observed from a closer viewpoint.  Though still based upon parallel vertical bands, the newly asymmetrical composition gave increased prominence to the various elements of door furniture and other visual incidents distributed over the corrugated surface(s).  This triggered thoughts about Rae’s habitual scattering of disparate motifs, (apparently) randomly across a composition.  If ‘Shut 1’ was elegantly austere in its formal regularity, '2' soon became more extravert and less rigorously balanced.

Industrial Shutter, Leicester, 2012

'Shut 1', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Two
Joined Panels, 150 cm X 100 cm Overall, 2012

'Together 1', 2012

This increased overtness is also expressed through the introduction of a certain Pop sensibility into the individual motifs.  Initially, they evolved from the elements of graffiti and stickers in the original subject and came to refer to the appropriation of contrasting, (often kitsch), font characters and cartoon motifs in Rae’s painting.  It revives a certain quality of my own work from early 2011 too, (best seen in ‘Together 1’).  However, whilst Rae appears to pay homage to the online world, my own work remains largely tethered to the materiality of the urban environment.

In its construction, ‘Shut 2’ followed my usual procedure of layering paper collage and acrylic paints.  It shares a similar background palette of off-whites and pastel blues, and certain visual textures with ‘Shut 1’.  I realise that, in addition to obscured blue paint in the source subject, these blues also derive from the backing paper of the tattered advertising posters I regularly salvage and collage into my work.  My use of repeat dot patterns originated from observations of perforated security shutters, but here, may also recall to the printer’s dots in such material.

I think there may be more mileage in my ‘Closed’/’Shut’ theme but suspect that the series will probably rest here for a while.  ‘Shut 2’ clearly reflects the ideas around urban entropy, economic frailty, mixed messages and exclusion that haunt its three companions but with an added dimension.  I once described last year’s early works to someone as "Like Pop Art left out in the rain”, and this painting may be the closest I’ve got to that feeling so far.  Above all, it’s my most recent attempt to capture the sense of flimsy market stylings pasted onto the crumbling edifice of a society in decline.