Solitude, oil on canvas 120x120cm
Currently untitled (Gratitude/ Attitude), oil on canvas 120x120cm
It has been a while and there has been plenty happening. As is evidenced from the two paintings above, I have been busy in the studio. In another first for this year, this is the first time I have gone back in to the studio and painted landscapes from a combination of photographs and memory. Obviously I have painted landscapes before. I hardly think I could refer to myself as a landscape artist and not paint a landscape, but it has been ten years since I painted a horizon line or a sky in the studio. When I returned to study a post graduate degree some...eleven(?) years ago It was all about movement and horizon. I painted from photographs, or 'prints' as they were referred to and I observed colour and light. Then in my first year of post graduate study my lecturer said to me 'I think you need to go outside and paint', and so I did. (Have I mentioned this dialogue before?) It was not until the masterclass with Euan MacLeod and he mentioned that he painted landscapes in the studio from photographs and memory that it actually occurred to me that this was a plausible method of painting. Is that strange? I also heard an interview with Amanda Penrose Hart, whose work appears so instant and lush and rich that it seems unimaginable she would spend more than half an hour applying paint to canvas or board, say that she had spent a year on one painting.
Armed with all this information, several tubes of oil paint, a few old canvases and a couple of coastal photos that I took, I set forth to conquer the photographic landscape. And do you know something? I have actually been have fun! I enjoy the play of paint, the experimentation, making a mark and then wiping it away again. I have not become a slave to the image, which I thought I would having done so in every other painting I have copied from print, rather I use the image as a rough guide to colour, light and movement until the painting takes a life of its own and the image become irrelevant. Essentially, the application of paint itself is all about line, depth, perspective, colour, light and tone, the language of art.
I am going to enter the top painting 'Solitude' in The Mission to Seafarers Victoria annual maritime art awards, The ANL Art Prize. This painting is about not only those who spend months alone at sea, but the ones they leave on land. Suitably melancholy.
