EXPERIMENTAL COMPOSITION

HOMAGE TO JAPAN: SKY/EARTH/CLOUDS 

Abstract Vector Composition:

Real-world paint strokes digitized,

recoloured and recomposed.

GRID EXPERIMENT

Vector Art experiment. I'm not usually a fan of random painterly gestures but I do love the hard collision of amorphous shapes next to a simple grid form, as if a hole was ripped in the surface of the screen.

SNOWBOUND

Being snowed-in right now in England, the enforced time at home has allowed me to find these drawings from December 2004, when I was staying in New Rochelle, New York. We were similarly snow-bound, and on one of the days, I spent an hour in the garden looking at tiny fragments of twigs that had fallen off the trees from the weight of the snow. They looked like intriguing bits of code, or written characters from an as-yet undiscovered language. It was very satisfying to make art that was so minimal.

Twigs in Snow I - IV New Rochelle, NY, ink on A5 paper, circ. Dec 2004

Stone in Snow, New Rochelle, NY, ink on A5 paper, circ. Dec 2004

PENCILLED IN

As mentioned in the previous post, November's work-in-progress is now out of bounds due to being on display at Custard Factory. This has necessitated starting a new piece before the other is finished. The difference, is that this time I am making pencil shapes first, rather than automatically painting onto the blank grid. Whether this will result in a piece of work that looks significantly different than its two companion pieces is debatable. But at the moment it's a refreshing change to spend longer composing in pencil.

Untitled Work In Progress, Pencil on Canvas, 60cm x 60cm, Dec 2017.

BLACK BOX

When in doubt, just paint over it...but save a little bit from the previous iterations, just in case.

Acrylic On Canvas, 50cm x 50cm

DETAIL SHOTS

[MORE] SURFACE TENSIONS: CURRENT WORK IN PROGRESS

Okay...so what happens when the piece you are working on, no longer looks any good, but isolated areas look beautiful? This piece has been constantly evolving - on and off - for two years. It's a 60 by 60 acrylic on canvas, and I don't know whether it's because of the size or proportions, but despite scores of revisions, it has never looked satisfactory to me. 

You've seen from previous posts that I am fascinated by what is happening on the surface of my paintings. I love holding a painting in my hands, and playing the light across it, reading it from side to side like an engraving, or a piece of lazer-etched nanotech, or a 3D topographical map. To me, they look like buildings, cities, or even worlds.

This is how minimalism probably started: Cameras got invented, and artists inevitably would document their work, focusing on details of interest, and then come to the same conclusion that I have - that the details look better than the actual painting.

I used various new techniques to get the paint to behave differently. I like to degrade the surface to keep it from looking too smooth. I want it to look both rigidly uniform, but weathered, like a piece of modernist architecture that hasn't been maintained.

I asked my studio colleague for her opinion the other day, and apart from finding the current colours 'revolting', she observed that it's not the composition that seems to interest me, but the lines on the surface. She said it's no longer a painting, it's an installation. 

I find that perhaps it's more like a sculpture, because I'm constantly attacking the surface with a knife, or peeling bits off, or waiting until the paint is like a kind of plastic cement, and trying to mould it.

Since these pictures were taken, the painting has changed again, which is why I won't show photos of the whole piece. And also because I assume people will find it as anticlimactic as I do.