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Notes for a lecture on my painting: Why do I paint the subjects that I paint? Buildings and cars?
It's Difficult to explain…You have to go back to my earliest interests......
All painting is about colour, shape, design….and the pleasure in paint as a substance to be manipulated…
I Started out painting abstract pictures….not overly conceptual but interested in the illusion of space…..all painting is an illusion….of the three dimensional world (criticism of conceptual art is silly – all art is conceptual…there has to be an idea!)
Painted blocks and rectangles and grids….tiny fragments of colour showing through
Composition and harmony….or disharmony…..(this has an equivalent in music) and also mark-making – one of the great pleasures of painting – fast, slow, accidental, calligraphic…..paint
as a slippery, creamy, malleable substance....
Eventually I painted myself into a corner – so I looked out of the window
and painted the rooftops from my studio….then went to New York and painted rooftops from up high….the canyons below…..geometry and space. America was perfect for this –
the conjunction of different architectural styles.
Eventually I had to come down to earth – street fronts, shop awnings and
signs, the iconography of the street…telegraph poles and traffic lights,
scaffolding and dustbins.... for the first time there was a little bit more of a conscious narrative…..a different tradition…Impressionists painting the city and
Pop art…..comics, cartoons, text…..an interest in graphic art….the visual poetry that we see around us every day……and
also Edward Hopper and the loneliness of the city.
Also the city provides endless narrative…the sense of place and how evocative that is in
ones memory….light and shadow, the hubbub of the city, loneliness, cinematic representation.
Cars are also evocative of the past. They have personalities and spark
memories of our past.
I’ve since developed other passions/hobbies and obsessive occupations…documenting old shop signs and lettering,
reflections in windows (a favorite of painters) graffiti, doorbells...
I Realised that I liked the fabric of the past, the old buildings
and surfaces surviving in the modern world…e.g.. Painted signs etc so there is an element of nostalgia…..but not kitsch I hope. For example,
with Jack Vettriano and others …theirs is a fictionalised world….30’s dresses, waiters, men in tails, dancing on a beach…..it’s a conceit to manipulate the viewer…sentimental and corny
- nothing to do with the present….I paint what still exists, what’s real…the art deco hotels are still there….there is a modern car in
the Marlin painting.
Cuba was perfect…all the elements…crumbling buildings, texture…old cars…intense light…pastel colours…but it exists here and now....
And I’m still passionate about what you can do in painting that you
can't do in any other medium….painting light and atmosphere….the
alchemy of paint…makes you believe you are looking at glass or metal or pavement or palm trees….again
an illusion.
Stillness and silence…two of my favourite painters Vermeer and Chardin……quiet, still, exquisite attention to surface….magical and sublime rendering of
the space between you and the picture.
And other painters I love and aspire to…Matisse and Cezanne…decoration and design…..building shapes, simplifying the world, less is more….luxurious…always drawing …organic….
Yes I use photographs but I don’t want people to say…"it’s so real it’s like a photo"…I edit, crop, manipulate colour, reduce the palate, change the scale, add things, subtract things, merge and composite photos…in the end painting can do so much more
than a photograph... October
2006 |