I wondered if I had about three blogs ongoing, that would cover all aspects of my artistic life. And all I did was update in a circular pattern! I wont do that. But this blog having been started kind of needs updating as things I do relate to it and things happen in the woods.
The Kent Wildlife Trusts programme of land management enteres into its final stages and they still ask me to do artworks and stuff for them….So I think I am still artist in residence…..I will always be an artist working in these woods.
I wanted to formally document a ‘Return to Painting’. This is interwoven with a public event called the ‘Wildart Drawing Day’. I am so pleased with the results.
‘Painting’ in the public realm. I love it.
But I struggle to see people giving it any validity at all in the current world of Public Art, one or two murals here and there over a period of 10-15 years. Digital images seem to have made it redundent in my world. New technologies have pre-ocupied artists and commissioners as progress marches forward.
Well I went backwards not forwards and did some painting specifically about one particular place, Thornden Wood. A site specific work if ever there was one, called ‘The Shelter Posts’. They are painted using clays and soils taken from the woods. I am so pleased with them and it has restored in me some kind of real validity for painting again after all these years. Painting as a medium I always felt was taken away from me by fashion and changing attitudes and my own ambiguity towards it, and inability to use it as a public realm medium. I love it.
We moved a piece of sculpture ‘The Bird of Prey’ or Raptor as it is also known. And I will have to make a totem post marking the Wildart Drawing Day, this is the fith post in the series and I just peeled the bark off the chosen post. I felt like I might be cutting the skin of a large fish or small whale.
This preparation, ie making paints from soil and felling specific trees and peeling the bark off, does feel very ceriomonial and ritualistic. Unlike any other public site specific works I have ever done before!
A Return to Painting see slide show link below.
http://www.flickr.com//photos/rob-turner/sets/72157631634299401/show/
