Transcendental doodling

I have trouble with the idea of calling some of my work "abstract art." I guess that's what many people would call it but I just came up with a new term for it. Transcendental doodling, that's how it feels. I've always enjoyed doodling little squares. Sometimes little squares in bigger squares. It's not really much more complex than that. However they do make me really fundamentally happy in that simplicity and I thought  I'd take a moment to explain how they came about. The first one which was more than a doodle is this huge piece which still hangs in my house. Originally it was a bit of problem solving on my part.

Behind it is an elaborate track I routed in for my son's brio engines when he was about 3. He's 15 now so it hasn't been turned over for some time. It's emulsion and glitter. The colour which was on my wall and the glitter I was using for hand made cards. I still love it.
They remind me of so many things. I love cities at night, but the image I've adored the most comes from a book of natural wonders. It's an aerial photo of the Guilin Hills in china taken at dusk with the rice fields shining in little squares of golden light. It's so magical. This picture of the scene in daylight is wonderful.

Most of my work involves realistic rendering of people, animals or scenes so painting little squares is like sending my brain to a buddhist retreat to recover. The squares and the colours paint themselves.

 It really is like doodling. I sometimes lose myself completely in them. They're how the world looks inside my head, maybe they're little clusters of sparkling thoughts dancing away along my neural pathways. I always feel refreshed and happy when they tell me they're finished. Here's todays transcendental doodle, done while enjoying sunday morning telly :)

Show me the monet? Not on your nelly!

I love it, I don't want it to ever end.

BUT,  it's not for me. My son sat watching it with me said the words which must besaid in homes around the country during the x factor, dragons den, masterchef, probably even Jeremy Kyle  "You should go on there your paintings (singing, invention, cooking, dysfunctional relationships) are good enough to be on there"

Hmm. I shall leave that in the realm of the subjective. All I can say is that the people buying at the exhibition at the end was aimed at aren't necessarily people I have an affinity with and therefore aren't the people my work is aimed at. Trust me, I can be as pretentious and sycophantic as the next guy if that was what I wanted to do but I couldn't stand upand try to justify my work to people I'm not painting for. I love fine art in all it's forms, give me Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin over BobRoss And that Kincaide fella. But that's my choice, it's like fashion, home decor, music. I don't think anyone needs to apologise for what they like.

So it's fascinating to me. I'm not keen on the idea that these judges get to decide for everyone, but they're not, they're deciding for people like them, and that's legitimate init's own realm. The people who get rejected on that show may well find high adulation in another market. There's a difference between deciding what's good through a filter of cultural elitism and technical merit. There's a difference between fine art and pushing paint around. It matters not if the judgement is "would that looknice in the dining room with the purple wallpaper.

I've got no problem with anyone who embraces the format. I envy their confidence if nothing else. But for me- I'm not on a "journey"- I'm living my life. I've got hopes rather than dreams. I just have too much reality going on to be a part of reality tv.

;D

Ignoring creative block

I'm stuck- torn between directions for my work to take. Instead of agonising about it or "tackling it" which sounds a bit aggressive for a friday I'm doing the artistic equivalent of sticking my fingers in my ears and singing la la la  at the top of my voice.

But it's working. When I was at school I used to spend a lot of time drawing my favourite pop stars from magazines and so it feels like quite a nostalgic activity to look for photos of movie stars and fill my sketchbooks with them. It's like meditating. When I paint commission portraits, more often than not I trace the outlines to save a sudden realisation that eyes are too far apart when it's too late. So it's liberating to draw freehand and have no pressure to make the draiwng look like the subject.

In the process I'm definitely getting used to drawing faces which don't look like me. I had a real problem when I was painting nudes in that as I went along with painting, the face would gradually morph into mine. The lips especially. Tiny little changes in every layer of paint and the lip shape would be mine. I'd look back over photos I took of every layer and watch as I appeared.
When I've done a few more I'm going to pick out some of my discarded nudes and see what happens.

Then I'll work out what's going to happen on these blank canvases...

Finding a new way...

At the beginning of this year I had no work for sale in my own name. I forget that sometimes.
In January I made the decision I'd been working up to for ages- to give up trying to sell the work which is now wrapped and archived from the two years I'd painted under a different name. If you want to see my old blog to see why I used a different name and where it all went wrong click here, but you need to be over 18...

If not, here's one of the two pieces I've stolen from that portfolio and now claim as my own. It was painted in January and I only painted one more piece before I decided to concentrate on work which is easier to exhibit and less controversial. I'll still work on them occasionally because I love them and I spent a lot of time and work with models producing some great images, some of which still demand to be painted.


Because I jumped so suddenly, I had no idea what my work would be like. And quite honestly, when I look at it, it's not what I thought it would be at all! I do love painting flowers, they give me a lot of the same feelings I had painting nudes, but I didn't really think I'd be painting  some of the landscapes which are on the walls drying all around me.

My work on the left, Claire's on the right

Today I took my work to art on the railings in Norwich with my talented friend Claire Cansick, and when I put it up and stood back to look at it I realised I need a new direction. At least A direction, my work is all over the place in style and subject. The paintings I have in my head don't look like the paintings I've been doing. I need to narrow the gap between what I like to look at and what comes out of my paintbrush. I guess it won't be easy at first but I need to get back to basics, have some fun with paint and see what happens.

I also need to work on my sales skills. Hiding behind Claire isn't really working

Watch this space :)

Guilty pleasures

 I confess, I'm addicted to painting half imagined landscape paintings on 3.5 x 2.5 inch pieces of wood.

Why do they make me feel guilty? Because they're such a pure joy, because I'm just playing with colour, they almost paint themselves. It's the closest I get to a flow activity as defined by Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi in one of my favourite books, so I should just be glad about it.

It's silly because I often decry those people who think if you're happy you must be doing something wrong. All my other work has an element of hard work, sometimes disappointment, even despair. But these tiny  things have no real way to go wrong, and it doesnt matter if they do. I just keep going until it's time to stop. They make me smile. They're forged from memories, photos, sketches, imagination and sometimes just from a need to know what happens if I mix white with ochre and juxtapose it with cornflower blue.

I should probably offset my guilt by doing the ironing. I totally hate that!

Why oh why do you paint..... flowers?

 Yellow orchids for sale on Affordable British Art

Nobody has asked me that. As I once predicted in another blog I wrote when I was still painting subjects which permanently attracted lively debate and often blatant rudeness. But I can answer this one, and hopefully not provoke any strong reaction at all. Life's much easier now!

 I didn't expect to love painting flowers at all but I've found a way to approach them which really appeals to my own sensibility. I don't want to end up painting things I wouldn't have on my own wall. Infact, if the rose painting doesn't sell fairly soon it could be one I decide to keep. It'd really go well above my bed. I daren't put it there though in case I don't want to sell it at all.
When I was painting nudes, the process was as important as the finished work. Over a few years I'd developed a technique for the photo sessions. I'm not a quick painter, my work evolves over many layers and I'm impatient. Live models are great for drawing but for me I have to work from photos so if I want to get up and paint at 2 a.m. I can! The photos were sometimes taken on a very basic camera, using various lighing including but not exclusively using professional studio lights. I used colour gels and often produced very dramatic sensual images. The photos were never seen in their own right as the women I used were people I know rather than professional models, so there seemed to be a lot of secrecy around it. Now if I want to show the photos I can.

Sometomes I bring flowers in or borrow from bunches of flowers in the house and stage them in the same way. Going through the photos after the session gives me the same excitement. Of course I can't share the joy in the same way with my subject, but I still love the results, and I think it's probably a very different way of looking at a subject to imagine it as a painting. The photo above is lovely but I know it's going to take some patience if it ever becomes a painting.

Flowers are definitely giving me what I miss from nudes and lingerie, the fine detailing and sensuality are all there. An added bonus is that more people can imagine them above the mantelpiece, even if the vicar drops by for tea. All the beauty and none of the controversy. And I'm very sure I'll never be asked what I'm wearing to paint a chrysanthemum. That's the best thing of all..... :)

Doing what comes naturally

My portfolio is irritatingly random. If you take into account all my work available to buy, it makes for a less than homogenous collection. House numbers, cards, aceo collectables and a huge range of sizes and subjects of painting done over many years. They appear all over the internet, and in local craft fairs and exhibitions.

It's difficult to keep a balance between what I find easy, what I like looking at and what I think will sell. I don't have the luxury of doing this for fun so it's never far from my mind.

My natural painting style is very recognisable in my larger work. I often start work with a strong idea of how I  want a painting to look, but it gets hijacked by my dominant painting style. Now and again I'm really happy with a piece of work and it's just how I imagined it.

When I began this painting, I had a set of photographs from salhouse broad to work from. I try really hard not to use my hipstamatic iphone camera as I know it's a lazy way of producing images to work from but I've isolated what it is that I really like about the pictures and it's quite a simple thing. It's the border around the picture- like old style photos. If you look through my sketchbooks you'll see that I draw little frames around everything. Not just for compositional reasons but because I like to see them contained. There's just something wonderful to me about a frame, I think I've struggled a lot with the current vogue for painted edge canvases. Slightly better for me if I paint the edges black or in a complementary colour because if you look from an angle the image is better contained.

In this painting I've taken advantage of the filters applied in the software and after a bit of colour adjustment (I'm battling an addiction to blue- all my landscapes want to be in blue and turquoise with a hint of pale ochre) I started with something to work from which almost already appeared to have a frame, without just drawing a line near the edge of the canvas and creating a border. Now it's really got an extra level of nostalgic feeling to it, it reminds me of dreams, and of those bizarre arcade machines I was obsessed with as a child where you paid 1p to look through a pinhole into a box where some curous and often disturbing scene would take place in a scale model toy setup. We were so easily entertained years ago!

I'm going to try really hard not to battle against my natural painting style and just see what happens. Maybe I'll end up with a collection of work which makes sense!

When it's dry it'll be for sale at Affordable British Art