Large Paintings and Drawings
This is a bit of a dogs breakfast of pictures done over a 20 year period during the 1980’s and 90’s, but it serves it’s basic purpose at the moment.
I will eventually present them better and put the collection into the structure of the overall site in a more meaningful way. For the time being any comments are still very welcome.
More recent paintings
I have blogged about the idea of “narrative layering” over the basic mood of a painting and I think that my more recent work begins to achieve something of this.
(I’ve just watched the video for Amy McDonald’s song “Spark” which gave me some of the energy for this painting. A very different and top quality video interpretation from my own picture. The video kind of does what it says on the tin and is completely different from my picture.)
My picture is perhaps a bit more exploratory and deliberately open to interpretation (just another way of saying “unfinished” is maybe a better way of putting it 🙂 ). I approve of using other peoples art in that post-modernist way. Music in particular finds its place in visual art such as painting, without taking it over (usually).
Comparisons with video aside, I think that the overall picture works well from a composition and a mood point of view. Is the girl in a gallery looking at a picture or in a picture looking out at the gallery. If it is a dream, then which of the four characters is the dreamer and why. Are they all the dreamers?
July 2016
With this one the link is not a song but a book (and a Film). The classic novel of the same name by Alan Sillitoe made a great impression on me as a young adolescent and this is some kind of homage to that, as well as being something more. In the same way that I claimed more than just the song for my picture “Spark”.
It is a starting point that encompasses references to two other books if you look closely. An old Ladybird book about Robin Hood and the Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
Post modernism is often criticized for being an over complicated “hotch-potch” (so to speak) and I am wary of doing that to my own artwork. This is a complex painting but I would defend its coherence. This painting of mine grew over several years until I finally cropped it down and re-mounted and re-painted the surface layer to introduce the “narrative” theme that I keep returning to. It seems as if many of my paintings have existed as “dreamscapes” waiting for the interpretation to come along. With this one, then Tom Courtney popped up again as an idea from another picture and paradoxically refuses to finish the race, but finished my painting for me.