Now seems like a good time to reflect on what I have written so far and where I am at now and where I feel that I am going with my degree project.
I started by looking at artists who addressed the sublime and/or a sense of place in their work and I said that this is what I want to do in my work. Nothing has changed there although I have meandered about a bit and fretted over canvas size, figuration/non-figuration, etc. I feel now that I have moved past these concerns. If something fails then I wil just try again, try different things. It doesn’t really matter – it is the experience of working that I enjoy and I am getting used to the ups and downs in the outcomes. I constantly get reminded not to bin work but sometimes I need to – it is therapeutic to oust stuff that I don’t want in my environment and in my head.
Orford Ness, to me, seems a place of the sublime – the sense of the past (what is that?), the desolation of this unpopulated, non-built-up part of the planet, the threat of flooding and loss (all to obvious this winter) and the remaining scraps of war juxtaposed against the delicate lichens and occasional sight-seer. A strange wasteland indeed. Sebald, in his book The Rings of Saturn (p. 237), said that the place made him feel as if he was “amidst the remains of our own civilisation after its extinction in some future catastrophe”. I have tried to capture this in the paintings shown here. I reworked the painting Meaningless Wreckage shown in the third image 3 to make it darker and more menacing (as shown in image 4). It is as yet unfinished. I will go back to Orford Ness in April and May and create more drawings and paintings on these themes for my degree project.
This painting was made today – it is inspired by one of the photographs that I took during a visit to Orford Ness earlier in the year when I walked round the place. I wanted to capture the sense of isolation and remoteness and the rough textures. I used ground pumice and black lava gel to achieve the foreground textures.
I made these small works last week. They are acrylic and pen on canvas scraps pasted onto a cardboard backing. Their subject is painting, concrete and the natural world. We continue to build up and concrete over the environement – effectively squeezing out the natural world and living in an increasingly more artificial one. Horizons and Frames, whilst incorporating the painterly devices of their titles, concern possible futures in the former case and boundaries and limitations in the latter.
Went to a talk by the artist-photographer Andreas Schmidt in the Waterfront yesterday afternoon. Really loved his Vegas photographs, and his way of placing them where they have a symbiosis with their surroundings. I also liked his idea of using photobooks to display his images in a way that gave them a meaning when grouped together in this way. I started thinking about how to display my own photos because I want to do it in a way in which they have meaning and it seems to me now that a photobook could be the way to display my photos together with selected images of my work so that my intentions in producing the work is clear.
I have decided to work on paper for a while. I think that canvas was too “precious”. Anyway, this has started to work. I have produced looser work that is, I think, a bit better. I just need to remember to use the same technique on canvas.
I used some of the details of my drawings of the power station to make some dark paintings. The first is about the looming, dark, impenetrability of the building. Also, something about degeneration – let’s face it, these buildings are going to be around for centuries. The second painting is more about logic – I was thinking about the science involved in the splitting of the uranium atom to produce nuclear fission. The third painting is part of the building with a sort of bridge. It is about the bridge between the natural and unnatural environment and is as yet unfinished.
