Week Thirty-Seven | Painting It All

15 Nov

I have been working hard to unite my experimental practice over the past year and a half with my previous, much-loved but grown-out-of landscape painting practice. I can’t paint it all yet but I am working on paper and in sketchbooks to break up the energy after working on large canvases lately, trying to introduce all my recent learning into painting without falling into old habits. The key elements are

Ruination
Beauty
Place
Grief, belonging and loss, also sense of melancholy
Penetrating the z-plane
Transformation
Ambiguity that was missing previously - imagination maybe
More me than place
Scale - I have always wanted to work on an immersive scale
Intersection between drawing learning and established painting practice (this is the hardest part, maybe the distinction doesn’t even matter…?)

I have been working on sketchbooks in the kitchen since the MA began, working through ideas in paint and drawn elements. It is all a type of visual thinking and the thing I notice most is how stopping earlier leaves a rawness that I lack in my bigger work, which gets tight and controlled. I also notice the balance between observation and imagination has tipped towards the former and I would like to pull my work back into my imagination. The work I was making before coming back to the UK was the best I have made so far, and I think I was much freer to work with little else going on and secondly I think it was more imagination based. I value the time I have spent in the past few years learning to be in the landscape and absorb its magnificence but it’s time to go back into myself as the main subject of my work.

Below: a selection pages from eight Moleskine sketchbooks in progress from A6 to A3 size, exploring marks and ideas I am looking to work through into my larger paintings.