Tuesday, February 14, 2017

September 2014

oil on panel 71x61cm


You may (or may not) have noticed that there wasn’t a January blog post. I apologise. My attempts to finish this painting for last month were soundly defeated by Xmas and New Year, plus a couple of doses of man-flu and one of lady-cold during December and January - and rather than just post yet another Window Work I just didn’t post anything.


I’ve been working on this on and off since October, so it has taken a long time. It’s as finished as it’s ever going to be, though it feels a little stressed and overwrought, and not as calm and serene as I had planned. The location is a real place – a small glade on Easter Craiglockhart Hill – and I took the source photographs myself back in 2014. It was late afternoon and the sun was quite low. I’d toiled up the steep path on the ‘pond’ side (carrying my bike on my shoulder), and emerged from the trees looking down into this small open space. The decaying mauve and orange rosebay willowherb opposite were lit up by the sun, and the elms and oaks behind me cast their shadow onto the two central ash trees. The atmosphere was still, and quiet - a serene lacuna in a particularly fraught day. Which felt a little like this*

It’s painted on hardboard panel for a change; I wanted a smooth surface that didn’t need ages to prepare. Unjointed battens were glued onto the back to make a simple frame to stiffen the panel and to receive all the stringing gubbins, and it doesn’t look out of place next to the canvasses. The cutting and woodwork stuff, as always without a proper workshop, was awkward, and (literally) a pain. That slightly bending forward position seriously does my back in, and I have to stop and ‘normalise’ it every ten or twenty minutes. Buying wooden stretchers from a shop and stretching a canvas is so much easier. The priming was a doddle though, so I suppose a prepared panel is best reserved for when I need a surface fairly fast. 

When I started composing this piece I knew there would be figures in it, but I was well on the way to finishing by the time I got round to working them out. I wanted two figures; one demonstrating dominance and power over the other. I used myself as both models, spending a morning photographing myself in alternating dominant and submissive poses - which may have been puzzling for the occupants across the road - then photoshopped the two ‘me’s’ together. So if both figures resemble a portly gent in sloppy joggers that’s the reason.

I’m quite pleased with some of the paintwork on this, and as usual the best bit of painting – the pink-topped trees on the left – was done almost without thought. What I’m not pleased with is that I made a huge mistake, or misjudgement, or wrong choice, whatever you’d like to call it. I darkened the right ash (which needed to be done) with an opaque mix and let it dry. This was an extraordinarily stupid thing to do, and it meant I had to re-paint the branch and foliage forms all over again. There are, apparently, parasitic worms which alter the natural behaviour of their unfortunate hosts for their own purposes, perhaps I was a victim of one such. Who knows, but probably not.

That day in September, when I went up the hill for a wander, was exactly a week before a referendum, and a poll result had sparked off a forceful counter-action from one side. ‘Events’ were happening, and the news on the radio and telly was a wall-to-wall avalanche deployed for that side. The weather was beautiful, and I would’ve gone out and left it all behind, but I had to stay in until the parcel I was expecting arrived. I remember the whole day as stressed and unreal, a little over-saturated, and perhaps I’ve unwittingly made the painting reflect that.

Again, sorry about January. With a bit of luck, normal service will be resumed next month…


*A version of ‘La Folia’ – a popular Renaissance and Baroque tune, and also the theme for the film ‘Fargo’. Richter’s version is part of a work about Virginia Woolf, and has a couple more very intense variations, and has only recently been released . What I was actually listening to on that day and around that time was this