Completed Painting: 'Untitled 3 (Constructed City)'

'Untitled 3 (Constructed City)', Acrylic, Screen Print & Paper Collage on Panel,
60 cm x 60 cm, 2020

Greetings from Plague Town!  I can't pretend Leicester's exceptional status, as the only British city to remain in strict(ish) pandemic lock-down, has impacted my own life too distressingly.  However, there is a palpable sense of frustration (and indeed, mounting anger) abroad, over the reckless behaviour and mismanagement that may have brought our local situation about.  Whatever the rights and wrongs of all that (as ever - I suspect the blame lies at several doors), It's frustrating to remain in a state of relative limbo, particularly as the rest of the country gropes its way towards something resembling rehabilitation.  Sadly, I doubt we'll be the only place to encounter such difficulties, before this whole sorry saga is over.  One can only hope something useful will have been learned from the mistakes made here (ha!) - not that the thought of being a test-bed for calamity is exactly comforting.

Anyway, as I say, my own existence remains relatively uncompromised - on a day-to-day basis, at least.  I had been going into work for a few days a week, over the last month, despite the fact that our school remained closed to the majority of students.  And there was some satisfaction to be gleaned from breaking the week up - and in regaining a partial sense of purpose in the outside world.  But that's once more on hold, given that, regardless of the lock-down conditions, we're now officially (if somewhat laughably) in the Summer holidays.  It feels fairly futile to try to predict exactly what awaits us in the 2020-21 academic year (besides more complications and uncertainty - no doubt), so for now, I'm a completely free agent, with only myself to answer to.  I really can't complain.  There are plenty of folk out there who'd give their eye teeth to be in this situation (and still getting paid).  And the answer - as ever, is pretty straightforward; just get on with some artwork.

So, in that spirit, here's the latest of my 'Constructed City' paintings to reach completion.  I've already described my slightly tentative entry into this particular phase of work, as reflected in the limited dimensions of the two panels previously completed.  This one is a little bigger (although still far from large), and represents an attempt to take some momentum from completing the two tiddlers.  Perhaps it's all in my head - but scale really seems to be an issue with these paintings.  I've yet to fully analyse exactly why, but it's clearly something to do with the size of individual marks and zones of colour as a composition becomes more complex.  Even at this modest scale, the simple act of doubling the dimensions of the panel's sides from 30 cm to 60cm, seemed to raise a whole new set of issues.

In fact, the basic composition was initially pretty close to both '1' and '2', making this new one much more of an evolutionary step than a radical leap.  And the theme of veiled geometry, which had already emerged, was deliberately carried over here too.  However, in this case, it became apparent that the simple expedient of dragging a translucent field of paint across a portion of the nearly-completed painting wasn't going to work quite so well.  And so the piece entered a somewhat extended phase of formal subdivision and over-painting of that central passage, before anything even vaguely resembling a satisfactory conclusion was reached.

In passing, it's also worth noting that this one includes an extension of the collage techniques already built into its predecessors.  As well as sections of some of my 'CC' screen prints, I was able to recycle some of the associated (and normally sacrificial) proofs - with a wash of indian ink applied over them.  That might seem a small thing perhaps, but it's always pleasing to devise a new method of covering some ground.  In this case, it's also justification of my belief that nothing is ever wasted.  Those proofs were originally laid onto notoriously unstable newsprint, so it'll be interesting to see how the painting ages. 

  

Anyway, if the final result is far more complex than originally intended, it' also represents a far more concerted process of problem-solving.  If I'm honest, I'm probably still not totally happy with the painting as a whole.  However, it does feels like some resolution was achieved - and that any unanswered questions are now best left for the next attempt.  And, actually, with hindsight, such pieces often prove to have been the most useful in any body of work.  Opening a whole new can of pictorial worms, even within a limited arena, is always more instructive, in the long term, than merely repeating what one already knows.

Onward...