Completed Painting: 'Map 2'

'Map 2', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Panel, 60 cm X 60 cm, 2015

Here is ‘Map 2’, - my second, just-completed painting of 2015.  It’s always the case that everything seems to take a bit longer than one might hope.  However, my current strategy of working on groups of related pieces simultaneously does seem to be paying off in terms of what would be called workflow in the commercial sphere.  It’s certainly a boost to start the year by completing something new every few days.

It’s also useful to be able to just reach for something(s) else already in progress, whenever a particular piece has got a bit stuck or I’m just sick of looking at it for the moment.  Usually, when I return to the original painting, it seems easier to clear the perceived logjam, - if only because I’m looking with a fresh eye/mind.  There’s no doubt the individual paintings are informing each other and solving problems as they come along side by side.  The only real problem I can foresee is the danger of painting the same picture over and over again.  I need to ensure that these pieces keep spinning off each other, in small ways at least, (even if only I can see them).

'Map 1', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Panel, 60 cm X 60 cm, 2015

Like ‘Map 1’, this painting has been consciously produced with June’s ‘Mental Mapping’ exhibition in Rugby in mind, and most of what I wrote about that one also applies here.  The same basic collage/paint approach, (incorporating found advertising posters), was employed, as were multiple references to the specific site where they originated.  In this case, it’s the same junction in Leicester, and the same portion of street map is repeated at the same scale and orientation, (if a little less dominantly painted).  This was achieved using the same manual methods as before.  Were I to include all the legends, icons and other cartographer’s symbols from the actual A-Z map, it would be definitely become necessary to source a higher-tech form of applying these maps, (and hand over cash, no doubt).  However, for now, I rather like the way the basic street plan operates as an abstract, formal element as well as a potential conceptual clue.

Junction Of Northgate St/Sanvey Gate/Soar Lane, West Leicester, January 2015

Opposite the corner where I salvaged the fallen advertising posters incorporated in this piece, is a building now housing a self-storage facility.  These enterprises have become a significant feature of contemporary cities, and represent a kind of re-materialised take on the idea of The Cloud, I suppose.  Clearly, the whole idea of small parcels of vacancy being a rentable commodity has a lot to say about our relationship with living space, the accumulation of physical possessions and the very nature of our economy.  It’s fair to say the compactness of the British Isles, and their increasing population, are ever-present issues here, along with the increasingly punitive cost of real estate, restricted scale of domestic spaces and paucity of coherent public housing policy.  Tangential to this are the obsessive British equation of land with wealth/status, and indeed, the matter of who actually owns, controls and makes money from tracts of both public and private space of all sorts [1.].

Junction Of Northgate St/Sanvey Gate/Soar Lane, West Leicester, January 2015

My fascination with the numerous primary yellow interventions scattered throughout our man-made environment is no secret, and my eye was inevitably drawn to that building’s garish yellow & violet livery.  If that is one obvious source of this painting’s chromatic scheme; another is the fact that I was able to collage a section of found violet and yellow UKIP poster material into it.  It felt good to be transmuting their pernicious rhetoric into something a little more constructive. [2.].

As already mentioned, my intention with these pieces is to include elements of text actually found at the source location.  Given all of the above, it was impossible to ignore the name of the self-storage company, (hopefully, without actually infringing any trademarks) [3.].  ‘Space’ and ‘Place’ are both, clearly, key concepts in much of what I do, and feel sufficiently open-ended as terms to allow for numerous potential interpretations.  On reflection, they do slightly fuel my current insecurities about habitually defaulting to the glaringly obvious.  Of late, my oft-stated ambition has been to find some middle ground between the visually/sensually derived stimulus and a modicum of conceptual rigour.  If this is to be taken seriously, I may need to consider slightly more oblique or sophisticated strategies, towards my textual elements at least, in future work.

Anyway, for now, I’m happy to call this one finished.  Actually, it’s one of those all too common pieces that I periodically look at and wonder, “What was I thinking?” then, a few hours later, find plenty of reasonably pleasing things in it.  Perhaps it’s all still just too fresh in my eye/mind to really judge.  I’ll confess to a tiny amount of re-fettling of the ‘Space/Place’ text since photographing the painting, but nothing significant enough to justify a re-shoot.  If anything, it just proved there was little to be achieved by further tinkering, and that it’s just time to get on with finishing the next one.

[1.]:  Although it’s way beyond the scope of this painting, it’s fair to say the whole issue of what exactly constitutes ‘Public Space’ is increasingly open to question these days.

[2.]:  The current depressing swing to the political Right is just another reason to feel baffled by the current state of British society.  I would in no way want to suggest that my own observations about available living space here share any common cause with their UKIP's essentially racist analysis of the situation.

While we’re on the soapbox, and in passing, - as a white, liberal atheist who regularly visits Birmingham, I can clearly state that the recent assessments of the city’s cultural profile by Fox News’ so-called Terrorism ‘Expert’ are some of the most inflammatory and ill-informed nonsense I’ve heard in a long time.  Such opinions deserve all the derision we can muster.

[3.]:  I should point out that I haven’t included the word ‘The’ and, beyond being inspired by a colour scheme common to many such enterprises, have deliberately avoided any serious attempt to co-opt their specific corporate identity.