A fine downy layer of frost collected on me as I travelled to the studio this morning.
My Dad had been in yesterday, working his magic, adapting the old drawing table to accommodate one of the canvases. Last week he made a ‘lean to' easel from three bits of aluminium sliding door runner.
By shutting myself in (dragging the drawing board behind the door) I can now work on all 5 pieces – and at roughly the same height. Last week I was fiddling around with scale drawings to try and get a feel for how the pieces might relate to each other in the space, now I can work with those relationships as the paintings develop.
The search for a writer has led to an interesting development that I'd not anticipated at the start of the project. I was thinking about how we see and how we put together an image of a place. As a result of a misunderstood telephone message I'm now hoping to work with an ‘audio describer'.
A good solid day of painting in the studio yesterday. Good light to work by and those wild winds that we were experiencing at the end of last week have died down so it was much quieter (and not such an ordeal to cycle).
Taking snaps of work in progress -useful at the end of the day to see the changes.
Have started working on all five canvases but I was frustrated at not being able to view them all, so I rearranged things yesterday evening and can now see and work on them all. The paintings fill the studio space and it's exciting to see them all together for the first time.
New challenge – finding an author to write the text for the exhibition catalogue. Looked on Interface, lots of writers but how do I begin finding the right person?
Full days in the studio – it's very physical working at this scale. The paintings are only 5ft x 5ft (they look so small on the blog photos) but that means that with my arms outstretched I can only just reach the edges with my fingertips. Working up close my whole field of vision is filled by with the surface. I'm climbing up on steps and stools to reach top edges, crouching to reach lower areas, moving in close, stepping back, shifting from one piece to another. Swift broad brush strokes, detailed slow movements. Updating the surface; fragmenting, unifying.
Three main things in mind as I paint, the order changing as I work:
Distilling elements from the visual residue of things seen on research visit.
The changing qualities of light in the gallery space, how light this affects the space, will affect the appearance of the paintings and therefore the experience of visitors.
The correlation I see between the physical processes of painting and how a place develops and how we build our internal pictures of places.
As I cycled to the studio this morning I wondered why I haven't updated this blog as often as I'd hoped to and how I could change that. As I paint, different streams of thought flow from conscious to subconscious. Sometimes as thoughts surface I think I'll record them later, then just carry on painting. At the end of the day, if I get around to writing, the thought processes are different; I struggle to recall the essence of those thoughts. I think the answer is to get into the practice of jotting things down as they occur so I can type them up later. Hopefully these ‘blog-it notes' will help transfer thoughts from my creative process more directly into the blog.
