The only way to make something new is to remain classic, to respect classic forms. That’s how you create things that last, things that don’t rely on trends. ...... Respect the rules of the trade, don’t leave anything to chance, don’t let anything slip by, are very demanding and strict, and use those methods, That’s how you can create things that last, and stand up to the test of time.    Rui Nogueira on Melville’s Gangster Films   

 

Before I start I must find a structural basis for the painting. This had in the past taken the form of a numerical sequence that would control where things were placed on the canvas. For many years this was invariably the way I worked. It gave me a surprising amount of freedom. When I took the idea further to control the type of mark and the colour used it is in the nature of painting that many elements were still open to decision. Electing to paint a landscape or a portrait you also have many aspects controlled but equally many aspects free; my method mimics this. I want to paint slowly so every aspect can be thought about, this naturally takes away from the spontaneity but I have a preference (at odds with my time) for the considered image.

 

A notional landscape has invariably been present and that presence has often been readable by the viewer. 

 

The painting occupies a flat plane but apart from a detour for a year from 1997 rarely have I abandoned the illusion of a third dimension. In the earlier work scale provides distance, later, and after I adopted the computer for “pre-compositional” exploration I worked in more than one layer, at first by using actual cut out layers in a three dimensional box. After I had started to work outside more consistently, the experience somehow, next time I did a studio painting, was to intertwined the layers, this unintentionally had echoes of cubism which I then pointed up.

The Vodňany sequence took this further, but here the superficial nod towards Cubism hides behind it the more overt tribute to Poussin. Before I had the idea that they would be based on a bridge in Vodňany I wanted to make a set of paintings to echo a group of landscapes Poussin did around 1648, and that was the reason these paintings came into existence.  

 

Ossia unwinds this and moves back towards the previous paintings where I had wanted the layers to be easily read. To be easily read was part of my metaphor that they should have the feel of a set of studies akin to those of Debussy or Ligeti, Overtly studies in technique but riding upon poetic or even metaphysical concerns.  

Up until the fifth Ossia the way the material is manipulated is fairly clear, after that I wanted more ambiguity and at the same time echoes of the landscape which had been part of the initial conception and is readable in the first two but not so apparent again until number ten. 

Initially I thought I would have a cycle of fourteen paintings but on getting to the twelfth with it’s far from ambiguous echo of a landscape I thought that perhaps I could have a second cycle, more scherzando, and I now have the first of these underway. The first two of these have become much looser than I intended, I realise they have echoes of some watercolours I did in 1981 that I never followed through.

Each Ossia was always supposed to have a matching landscape, hence the Edge of Forest sequence. I only had time to finish four of these last summer. These four match with their respective Ossias which are Numbers 1, 6, 10 and 12.

Recently it became apparent that I could continue these as a stand alone cycle. The left of the canvas being based on the Ossia the right of the canvas based on the forest. On starting to plan these out the idea came of echoing each landscape as a symmetrical structure on a similarly sized canvas, it’s best not to explain this too well as I need room to manoeuvre!

At 80 x 120 these are the largest paintings I have tackled for many years.

 

 

 

At Art School we had a film society, It was the foundation for my interest in film, later I would go frequently to the Film Theatre in Newcastle but also worked with Amber films showing films around various colleges in the North East. See a film 6 times in succession is an easy way to understand the finer points of film as art, and amongst those that failed my test was Citizen Kane.  I can remember Flying down to Rio, Wild Strawberries, L'Atalante, Jules et Jim, as standing  this wear test.

 

A film that did not have the wear test was Earth, I saw this  48 years ago, it must have been a 16mm print, the projector was old and noisy, Until that year I had not experienced film as art and this one was totally outside of my previous experience, It had an immediate effect on me. Very long and static I thought. Recently the version of the film restored by the Russian Film Council in 1971 has become available. It is far from long and static! I watch it and immediately remember the smell of the egg and chips I had eaten just before the screening all that time ago, I still hear the sound of that projector over my right shoulder.  Other films seen after long intervals that then I was overwhelmed by are not always a welcome homecoming, but this time it was. Far from the long film I recollect this is 70 minutes without a frame wasted, I had remembered the intense lyrical moments but forgotten the dynamic tractor epic that these moment frame. Now given the wear test and it passed blemish free. Soon the other two of Alexander Dovzhenko's early trilogy will be available, unknown to me but anticipated for over 40 years. A long and fascinating essay about the film is here

 

This film was propaganda about an event in which liquidating the kulaks as a class led to millions dying. I found Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will hard going when I watched it last year, not being able to divorce the film from the events it eulogised, however as with Dovzhenko she was perhaps not totally aware of the outcomes of the events portrayed, yet I let one off and not the other.

 

 

 

Just been working on the four Edge of Forest  paintings I did last summer, at the time I had intended that they would compliment the set of Ossia for Dancing, at the time not being sure to what degree they should integrate. Whilst I was worked on the third and fourth of the Edge of Forest, I also was working on the tenth and twelfth Ossia. The fourth tree and the twelfth Ossia being more obviously related by colour, the third "tree" and tenth Ossia by structure. However other aspect in both sets of paintings also related, if not so clearly.

I have been trying to find a clarity in the relationships, but inevitably coming up with crude and unsatisfying results.

Maybe I have the balance right in this pair, or more likely in a weeks time I will find it wanting. At the moment three pairs are in progress.

 

I tried to put everything in and therefore failed Partially to justify my teaching adults to paint watercolour, yet feeling like the emperor, I paint watercolours in South Bohemia, liking what I did and realise there were too many holes in my technique I return, we buy a small flat and can continue to paint from the same landscape each summer, Watercolour is then followed by ink, followed by acrylic, followed by oil. The subject matter varies from fields to farms to villages to trees, that being the last topic I attempted. Put people in my paintings? Technically I am scared of painting people because of a lack of technique, whilst I know if I were to put aside another summer I could get that ability back, I would still be confronted by the context The only figures that have been in my paintings successfully have been nude and never in a stylised form. Nude but not naked; akin to the conception of a classical landscape out of time, clothes lock it to the now or are dressing up. Or they are icons without a justifiable stylisation, this is disconcerting as I can only make them fit in as a quotation,.   For the most part I attended to some notion of truth in respect of colour, that is to say I suppressed aesthetic ideas of colour harmony and balance and tried to find a truthful understanding (in itself a subjective concept) of the nature of the colour in front of me. During the course of a painting day, colour is subject to change, yet I attempt to extract a truth about its nature, an enterprise that is bound to fail. (How cultural and aesthetic are the ostensibly objective explorations of colour in the impressionist painters.) Maybe the most successful as paintings are those where I lacked stamina and chickened out to culturally bound gestures that make a good painting. Product or process? I had inherited a concept as painting as process, partially from the modernist tradition that I tagged onto, but primarily from the composers who interested me. From 1975 to 1979 I took this to the extreme of rarely making a finished product. Without exiting process, gradually I learnt to consider my work as products, but products without much in the way of showroom appeal, for those who can still read a painting and unravel the route and intentions, but why should I make such an effort not to please people? New sequences of paintings often arise at the point when I feel I will never paint again, they then slink into my life through a crack in the armour, often a trivial crack at that. The Vodnaňy paintings were a response to one of these cracks, not having paintings in me I started from the given of an existing landscape, Enlarged a detail, overlaid it with supposition, luckily it was not long before the exploration of the material took on its own life. Many years ago my paintings were described as palimpsests, this referred to the constant erasure of layers of painting leaving its traces, now it could refer to the layers of meaning I attempt to abstract from the given material (then as paintings now as description.) Was it inherent in what I had always made? I think in clauses embedded in clauses, looking has become the dissecting of real or imaginary multiple meanings behind the immediate impression. The peeling stucco reveals the once present door that collectivisation blocked when the grand building was subdivided for the workers, then restituted to be further subdivided but now as a commercial commodity. The blandly perfect stucco covers its history whilst still revealing the changing value of energy, its inability to interact with light the presence of insulating foam board just beneath its surface. Maybe I could find more paintings within this material, I don’t know. I wanted a painting for a friends wedding, because of the multiple levels of their involvement with the Czech lands it seemed the most obvious step of taking a detail from one of these Vodnaňy paintings and exploring that. The second attempt was successful. However after coming to a halt with further ideas I took the first of these paintings as the starting point for a new sequence. This time the connections with reality and history where long erased and it would become an exercise in aesthetic judgement. Soon I understood it was something akin to a set of Etudes in the Debussy tradition; exploring techniques in the context of polished self contained art pieces. To help me along and as the first painting had a lively rhythm I loosely related each painting to a dance form, an idea that was forgotten by the fifth painting. I was doing an exploration of oil painting with my adult students, myself not having used oil paint for over 25 years and then only superficially, a moment similar to the taking up of landscape painting; I needed to get my hand in! It was the inability of getting a blue that I knew must exist and the realisation that only with oil could I find it that this sequence became my reintroduction to oil paint  

 I am now working on the ninth painting in the series. This is also a development and continuation of the paintings in the Vodňany sequence, so we now have 15 paintings and still counting. From the beginning this was a conscious attempt to get to  a painterly style, something I have always been very wary of. Criticised by another artist in the 70's  I cynically knocked up something that was  "painterly" She was fulsome in her praise, but all I had done was to introduce some easily achieved tricks that made her think she was in touch with the soul of this artist. In a museum in Scotland many years ago I saw an ordinary army issued footwear with a label "the actual boot worn by a local man at the battle of Omdurman 1898." Like the exorbitant prices paid for guitars, possibly, played by pop stars the imprimatur of authenticity whiffs of the fag end of religion, and I accept no part of it. Therefor I have always purged  "the artists touch" It is a painting you look at not me. I like the astringency of Poussin's paintings of the 1630s but as I am also aware of the gently crafted personal drawings that were concurrent with the public output. The drawings show the presence of a rich facture, its absence in the paintings forces us to engage with the meaning and content. In the late landscapes he gives an exquisite surface patina: Nothing tempts me into enquiring into the nature of the man. My paintings are open to reading as a sequence of events that correspond to the chronology of the painting, but then I play with this, whilst they are built in layers I do not work from deepest/earliest to topmost/most recent. However you can ascertain the joy I take in the creation of each image, and perhaps in the recent paintings done in oil, more than a trace of my discovery of that image. I have always avoided oil for the twentieth century baggage it came with, perverse in that my chosen medium, acrylic, comes with as much if not more! In transferring to a different medium I need to understand the new possibilities and limitations, Thus these paintings will become studies in my technical progress as well! Four and five have intricate surface texture, the latter with those acid colours that are particular to acrylic paint, whilst number six uses a colour range not available to acrylic, it's painting style somehow akin to early Italian primitives. Seven is an acrylic wearing the clothes of an oil painting. In the vigorous eighth the intension was to use sand for texture in the pale yellow, maybe this idea will return.

 I recently heard on the radio a reference to the Canadian folk singer Joni Mitchell's experiences with the Matala hippies who I gathered had  "immortalised"  in her 1971 song Carey. having never heard of the song or knowing little of Ms. Mitchell I wondered if I was anything to do with the hippy connection.  I was there in 1966 so thought I would put down my memories, which are far from complete, but this is what I have so far been able to piece together. I had crossed the island from Heraklion. I had a copy of Arthur Miller's 'Colossus of Marousi' with me, and so wanted to visit Agia Triada the Cretan archaeological site mentioned in that book. I didn't get there to late in the afternoon so the custodian told me of nearby Matala where I would be able to stay for the night. It was winter so perhaps in summer there would have been more visitors but when I arrived, there were about 14 people at the most: 2 right wing Germans, one more extreme that the other, who had come to re-live their Zorba the Greek moments (when on the north of the island I had met people who had got bit parts in the film); a couple of lads from the east end of London who were the only ones I remember smoking; and I seem to remember a couple of Danes; the rest were from America, and of those 4 or 5 were very middle class Jewish teenagers somehow on their way to Israel. I remember Matala consisting of maybe 8 small houses but the photos I took at the time tell of many more, maybe 30 house clustered along the beach and at the south end of the bay. The Germans had rented a room up the hill to the South of the bay, separate from the caves. I do remember walking up to where they stayed but otherwise have no recollection of exploring the village. Our evening haunt was a rudimentary bar near the beach run by a wily old man, who I learnt last year had only died 3 years ago. This knowledge came from an accidental encounter with a greek selling olive oil in Leeds, who owns olive groves a few kilometres from Matala, and whose family's oil I  purchased when in Matala all those years ago. In the summer the old man would put some tables outside. Inside, the hut had an earthen floor where we clustered around his stove whilst he would cook potato omelettes, pungent with the very coarse local oil, or occasionally fry some fish. We could drink Raki, coffee and wine when he had some. The Americans were obsessed by hygiene. Eating an orange the juice squirted onto the rock and the girl scuttled into the cave in order to get some disinfectant. Travelling light with a rucksack and a bottle of disinfectant! I arrived knowing of hippies, were these the hippies of Matala? or did that happen later on? for my part I had little empathy with most of them, and they little with me. One who was more interesting was somewhat older. He had set out around europe to spend his time writing his great american novel. His journey had not treated him well. He had started with cases of books and luggage but was now down to a typewriter. I read some sections of the manuscript describing his time as a clown on a side show at a fair ground, you threw wet bundles of cloth at him or maybe it was balls and he ended up in water. I slept in one of the caves and had little connection with the americans but did get to know some Scandinavians, one of who I would eventually leave with and go round the coast to  Agia Galini to stay with an english writer who had briefly passed through Matala. It must have been after this that I moved to the airfield at Timbaki. Here is a link to a 1968 article in Life magazine that may have cemented the Matala myth http://www.elzosmid.nl/matala/1.html

 I painted a wedding present for some friends; the painting came out well but it had not the celebratory air I wanted; so I did  a second version or ossia, to use the term from music when the composer includes an alternative version of a line of music, this is the second painting in the sequence. I had been wanting to do something akin to a set of studies as developed by Debussy or Ligeti, where the pieces would stand on their own but could also be seen as a set of studies in technical matters. My material is separated into 6 layers, I can change the order of the layers and rotate or otherwise transform the material in each layer. I can also leave layers out. I want each painting to be lively and celebratory. I hold a wonderful image of William Christie soberly dress in a suite dancing at the curtain call for Rameau's Les Indes Galantes amidst the spectacularly costumed performers. I thought I might relate each painting to a renaissance or baroque dance form but am not so sure that will be a good idea, apart from any other aspect painting will have to remain as my ossia for dancing as I have two very left feet, an expert on dance I am definitely not! I cannot imagine Rameau as a dancer but that did not stop him writing the most joyful dance music. The sixth painting went well then I realised I wanted a clarity in the colour akin to an early Dutch painting, so the solution was obvious, after wavering I have now repainted it in oil. It looks little different in a photograph but has a far greater depth of colour. The seventh painting is already finished, I also thought of using oil paint for this but instead played with the tension between its "painterly" style and the flat surface of the acrylic. Therefore I have a painting that looks like acrylic but done in oil and an acrylic that looks like oil!

 I had taken to the post office a small parcel of drawings that I had made in the previous weeks.  I filled in an elaborate customs declaration in old-fashioned diplomatic French and handed over my parcel. Walking back from the Post Office a Jeep came to a sudden halt and 2 Greek soldiers in scruffy airforce uniforms grabbed me  and stuffed me in the back of the open Jeep. With the two soldiers and a driver, we bounced with much dust up into the hills until we came to a derelict  looking base. A guard let us through the perimeter fence. I was taken to one of the prefabricated huts where in a small room was a rather surprised American Intelligence Officer, Intelligence being a relative word. He had the packet – had it come with us or had it arrived before? I explained and he had some idea but no experience of modern art. He seemed to accept my explanation but was uncomfortable with the situation. On my part I was already aware, from a conversation with a Greek tug captain and my fanciful imagination, that something was “going on” to the south of us. I knew the tug and building work in a small cove on the southern tip of the island was also involved; I had read The Riddle of the Sands so was fully informed!  I was not handed back my drawings neither were they ever sent on. I thought of Baden-Powell’s secret plans disguised as drawings of butterflies. At the time I was living on the old German airforce base at Tymbaki and working as a shepherd along with two ex-murderers who now worked for the enigmatic Jannis. It was through his Dutch girlfriend that I had acquired the job when I had been living in a cave at Matala a little further down the coast. I had thought of the idea behind the drawings before I went to Crete: If I took two different linear marks made of a single or pair of lines I could find the intermediate marks that would develop one into the other, like the game that transforms one word into another via an intermediary word, If I had 4  intermediate marks then I could assign a number from 1 to 6 and then I could numerically manipulate a series of marks. It was all very rudimentary.  I found my marks by rubbing out all but small areas on drawings I did of the southern coast line. When I eventually got back to England I did work out how I could get the marks to occupy a two dimensional space and make them revolve, cluster and vary in scale, and that to manipulate them with any facility a simple computer programme could be written. But of course this being 1966 I had no access to a computer so I could not be the pioneer of Computer art: instead I calculated by hand with the addition of a large book A Million Random Digits with 100,000 Normal Deviates that was published by the Rand corporation, which I got from the American Embassy.

Sequel

The American embassy was one of many embassies I visited at that time: German, French but more significantly the Polish embassy, just off Harley Street, where I would be ushered in to a gloomy oak panelled room and kept waiting for a very long while, then an enigmatic but beautiful woman would appear and loan me 10″ recordings of the Warsaw Autumn Festival and give me beautifully designed magazines all of which I have subsequently lost. Whilst returning from one of these escapades I was stopped on Petts Wood Station: A robbery in a large house nearby had required the police to round me up as a suspect, I was whisked off to the scene of the crime where a lady emphatically shook her head and an Inspector explained that I had nothing in common with the burglar, however the contents of the Cretan nose bag, an object that I had borrowed from "My" donkey did arouse their suspicions. Why was there material from the Polish Embassy along with a gold watch? the latter a cheap Smiths watch I had been given for the 11+ and always carried and never wore.

For the first time I watched a film by Rivette, It was Va savoir : I remember I watched a film. Was there direction or camera or cutting? Disappointment at first and wanting 'astonish me', instead I got Film; pure perfect film. By the end I felt very grown up. At the end I wished it had been somewhat longer: The first half hour took an hour the subsequent two hours took half that time! Certain to be watching more of his films. The next evening it was Tokyo Story which has been sitting waiting to be watched for over a year. Now suffering somewhat from the mild hype of a rerelease, why rerelease the print that exists is fine? It is a wonderful film but my preference would be for Floating Weeds, , with just 2 of his films watched I am in no real position to judge. As I am a beginner at this should I mention the Goose I cooked, the Borsch I made, that has more artistry than the latest painting in its current state! Have started on the fourth of the Ossia sequence, that was a hopeless name for this group but I was scared to zoom in tighter! In the last few weeks Agon by Stravinsky has been playing in my head. His models were the classic french dances as in Rameau opera-ballet that delight me. When I am low it is a choice between two great dancers, Rameau  and  Fred Astaire. I want to make dances for a resolute non dancer. We now have Ossias for dancing as the name of the group and each one with an appropriate dance; The one in the previous post being Rigaudon. The current one which is hopelessly bogged down, I will keep to myself for good luck or maybe because the escape strategy will completely alter its appearance and manner. My time is mainly taken up with making new frames and mounting, not an imposition as I always enjoy the practical skills involved in this craft, but not conducive to concentrating on a painting.

I now know the Vodňany sequence will be 7 paintings although they are not complete yet. Four of them are in the Czech Republic so will not know if I have second thoughts on those until the summer, but was without doubts when I last saw them. Now I can concentrate on the next group of paintings. I started these nearly a year ago, when I tried to paint a wedding present for some friends. I abandoned the first version and went with the second version. Whist the first painting worked well it did not meet the occasion for what it was conceived, a perfect term for the second version would thus be a Ossia, but not a good description of what I think I have in mind. The original idea was using little balloons of DNA sequences, plus the material derived, amongst other things, from paintings done in South Bohemia. Piano study as exemplified in late Debussy or Ligeti perhaps come towards a model. The structure is simple, 4 or 5 layers that are cut to reveal the layer below with conventional shadows to emphasise the separate layers. Hoping this simple devise will give enough space to understand some ideas I can otherwise not voice, so far the omen seems good. I have been working on number 3 for the last 3 days and apart from a little tightening here and there it should stand. Film as comfort blanket, High on my list is Amarcord by Fellini. However I am not as comfortable with his other films, I watched Orchestral Rehersal recently and just at the point I was going to abandon I kept looking and was glad I did, so on to Ginger and Fred wholly delightful but also pertinent and moving, then  And the ship sailed on (1983), something I know I will come back to again and again, I have found yet another comfort blanket!