Landscape and myth, the story that tries to explain. This subject is board and something which I cannot separate out when trying to respond to an environment. The moon and the crocodile brought this home to me. It was there with us that night, new and in the moment, but the sight and feelings it evoked were ancient and forever and global.
I feel a thread pulling my past and present together. This echoes ideas I played with for my degree work and dissertation all those years ago.
I have just come back from Snowdonia where I spent the weekend on a yoga retreat. The surrounding landscape was quite stunning; again I found time to gather some sketches and photos. This time there was also plenty of time just to be in the landscape. I am worried to say I am going to do this or that, I am playing with the images but in truth I don’t know what I am going to do. I did have some ideas but I can’t seem to quite get hold of it. I think I just need to get messy and experiment.
Sketches and photographs’, does the truth (not truth more what I want to say) lie between them or somewhere else completely.
Why am I looking at this again shouldn’t I have it worked out by now. I think in the past I would have taken a snap developed it and just used it as reference how it was. Now I take many snaps download them and bring them into Photoshop. There I can manipulate them, compose, blend, and draw into them. I can also scan in the sketches and do the same then bring the whole lot together and rework. I recently made a drawing based on a photo then overlaid it back onto the photo. My partner who is also a computer games artist, took a look and said oh that’s cool which filter is that…it was the me filter, the edges blur but it’s always the me filter. Is manipulating images in Photoshop very different from manipulating paint on canvas?
I sometimes wonder if the reference then becomes the work itself, or just remains a study for some final work.
We were walking along the costal path as the sun was setting behind us and the moon was already up in front of us reflecting on the shallow waters of the mud flats. Then a low cloud which the kids thought looked like a crocodile drifted over and swallowed it up. At such time the world around seems to bathe your soul in its beauty and wonder. So how do I respond to this in my art?
I feel like I am starting from the beginning again, exploring different ideas and media.
In this blog I want to look at various subjects such as:-
How to use my sketches and photographs, the mythic quality’s of landscape and how my environment work in computer games influences what I do in my painting.
