On Wednesday evening I went to see the opening of the Contemporary British Painters exhibition at the crypt gallery Marlebone Church. It was a lovely gallery in which to display the work and I enjoyed the evening. My painting, Wasteland was in the exhibition which runs throughout April.
Yesterday, a painting day in my studio. I’m looking forward to going out and about again to draw and paint but the atmosphere outside has been bad – news channels are reporting high levels of air pollution over large parts of the country including East Anglia – a combination of background pollution from cars, etc together with pollution blown in from Europe and dust from the Sahara. I have got a cough when I go outside. I don’t remember atmospheric pollution being this bad in Ipswich before. I went to London by train on Wednesday afternoon and it looked very smoggy around and in London. The news channels are reporting an increase in hospital admissions by asthma sufferers and people with lung conditions. When are we going to address pollution and climate change?
I made paintings of the sea using a part of one of my sketches of a high sea at Dunwich made earlier in the year as source material. The sea now, as well as being beautiful and a source of relaxation, is increasingly a more dangerous threat in the world – more and larger storms and tsunamis, higher seas causing flooding and affecting peoples’ homes, environment and employment. Therefore it seemed an appropriate subject as part of my project theme of the sublime and concern for the environment.
I used watercolour initially and flung water on the paper whilst controlling paint runs. Then I added more watercolour and acrylic colour until I achieved the effects I wanted. The main thing was to achieve the choppiness of the waves and a sense of the big roll of the sea. Now, High Sea is a very small painting and perhaps should be bigger to achieve more impact. However now that I have got the technique and effects I wanted I will make a larger watercolour/acrylic work on this theme.
It is probably worth mentioning the elephant in my studio at the moment. I have started oil painting. Initially roughed in with acrylics, I have applied oil paint to the structural shapes in the water of this large grey painting. The subject is structures and the sea. I also feel that it is appropriate that it is dark and gloomy and painted using oil – thinking about the forbidding aspects of the sea and pollution. I am not sure where it is going at the moment so I am just leaving it there annoying me for the time being….
The final two images here are of mixed media collages that I made at the end of March. I used a combination of masking tape, acrylic paint and oil pastel in making the images which follow on from the work Sea Structure 1 discussed in a previous blog. I do not feel that these images are as strong as the initial work but enjoyed exploring colour combinations in making them.
