Completed Paintings: 'space_time_01 [Le Temps]' & 'space_time_02 [Wood Gate]'

 

'space_time_01 [Le Temps]', Acrylics, Paint Pen, Paper Collage, Screen Print Fragments,
Ink, Ball-Point Pen & French Polish on Panel, 300 mm x 300 mm, 2023

Demands on my time and attention (from various directions), along with repeated bouts of minor ill-health, both intensified and multiplied towards the end of this year - making a degree of conscious time-management increasingly necessary. My choice has been largely to prioritise the continued production of new work over such distractions as social media and the like, with what spare time/energy remain. While the imperative to tell the world about my every move may have dwindled to the point where I currently experience regular impertinent/impatient elbow jogs from Instagram, there's some satisfaction in maintaining the generation of what I still regard as the real (i.e. physical) 'content'. 

Anyway, the festive period, and accompanying educational pause for breath, allow for a little end-of-year catch-up. 2023 ends with a clutch of modestly sized, multi-media panels in play, with the two shown here being the first to reach resolution.

These pieces originate in the same small zone of Leicester that has inspired a slowly-expanding body of work over the last couple of years. The general desire to connect specific, mapped territory, through time, with numerous layers of possible meaning and narrative has long been a constant in my work. It's also fair to say that some of the motifs, as well as the general collaged mixed-media approach adopted here, are hardly unfamiliar either. What does feel like an advancement is the increasingly oblique, intuitive, or simply impetuous, manner in which  mental/emotional/associative lines of flight are triggered by my repeated passage through certain points on the map. The intention is to allow this particular rhizome to continue to entangle itself through these little panels as 2023 turns the corner into 2024.

'space_time_02' [Wood Gate]', Acrylics, Paint Pen, Paper Collage, Screen Print Fragments, 
Ink, Ball-Point Pen & French Polish on Panel, 300 mm x 300 mm, 2023