I have been working on another older painting, which has now completely changed from its former minimal self.

This is how it looks today.

It has been sitting in my storage shed for many years, since I showed it at Watters Gallery over twenty years ago (that show is on this page), where it looked much like this:

Just because there has been a bit of a gap again in my blog, I’ve changed my priorities once again.

The gap has spanned the end of the tax year, and this led me to reflect on the year that I have just spent putting work for sale on this site. Its not really been working for me, and nor for anyone else for that matter, so I’ve taken them off again, and decided to commit myself to working outside the commercial world. It suits me better.

I am reconstructing the website appropriately, with more work in two new sections (Drawings, Extext). Currently you can visit them from here, or the home page.

The drawings linked above are selected from a larger number of ink drawings that I’ve been doing recently. Most of these are small, but I’ve started working on larger sizes too. This is proving quite a challenge, which is to do with the spontaneity (or otherwise) with which the ink flows and my control of it.

I turned ’Dancing backwards in time’ to portrait mode, and started to simplify it. There are way too many forms in there for me.

At the end of the day, I feel I’ve reminded myself just how much fun it can be working on a larger painting. That’s just what I wanted.

I’ve added the ’Shop’ pages back to the website, and shifted my server back to Fastmail again. We’ll see how that goes.

(PS. these pages have now been removed permanently, so that link above won't take you anywhere, and currently my website is hosted on my own Freedombox server rather than Fastmail - 16/06/23)

While it is always useful to work on new directions using smaller works as experimental groundwork, sometimes something else is required. I’m feeling a need to work on larger paintings and to gradually assemble a small but coherent group of them to present a more convincing body of work (and ideas). I haven’t done this for quite a while now. The last show I had (Watters 2018), consisted of multiple themes including a survey of work covering the last thirty years or so, new work that I would roughly describe as “Romantic Dada”, many recent small drawings and paintings, plus two or three medium sized paintings. This did not really consitute a coherent body of work. On the contrary, I felt like I was still very much exploring new potentials.

Its time for a change. I intend to start working on this new body of work right now. And to start me off, I will rework some older paintings that never quite satisfied me. The first of these is one that I put in that Watters show mentioned above, called “Dancing backwards in time” Here it is as it was in that show:

Today, my first task was to slow down some of that frenetic movement in the painting, by toning back a large part of it (using thinned black paint). The result was more interesting than I expected:

Returning to this one after a bit of a break, I find myself totally embroiled in the issues of how to proceed in a fog. I like fogs, as it happens, and this is inhibiting to progress in this case. I have to simply bite the bullet and attempt to make something new out of the previous stage, since in some serious ways it does not satisfy me. Its hard to see at the scale of these photos, but I think I’m making progress.

and then this:

Started back on some painting with this beginning;

I’m closing the new, experimental blog on Github, so I’ve deleted the link in the post on the 16th March. All the images have been transferred to the Extext section, and this is where I’ll be developing it now.

I’ve started a new section called Extext, which you can access from the home page (or here). This is an attempt to bring what I have been doing on the new blog (mentioned in the last post) back into the fold of this, my main, website. Its very small right now (just four pages) but its easy to maintain and add to, so I will!

I have deliberately made it look a bit different from the other pages as its all about trying to create something new, and out of context (thus the name ’Extext’). Sometimes all the history of my painting can become burdensome to me, and I feel restricted in how to move forward.

This is my attempt to do that, in a way that uses the medium of this web business a bit more effectively.

Its been pointed out to me that people reading this blog aren’t really interested in the technology I use to put it out on the web.

That is probably true, and if so, I apologise for writing about it. But I spend quite a lot of time engaged with this technical stuff, and I find the philosophy involved in it quite fascinating. It’s also not unrelated to what I do in my painting (I’ll write more on this soon).

I saw a program on TV recently where a Tasmanian man has a craft business of carving spoons from different timbers. He has found that using a knife to finish the spoons gives him more pleasure than using sandpaper. I haven’t seen any of these spoons but I imagine that the finish created by using a knife is subtly different. In the same way, I feel that writing a website directly in html code (as I do) produces a different product from using one of the many automated systems, such as Wordpress. Its the difference that is interesting, not that one way of doing things is the right way.

Some more work on these two smallish paintings. Gradually taking shape.

I’ve moved this website to a new host - Github Pages. I liked Fastmail as a webhost, but it was always just a bit too slow, since the servers are over in New York (I believe), and there doesn’t seem to be any locally cached sources for people to access it directly over on this side of the world. Github looks like a good alternative. To my mind, it seems very fast now, and I know that Github has servers all over the world. I also like the way its set up, even though it has taken me a bit of time to get to grips with the git system of version control, which is behind everything done there. Since git grew out of a linux base (developed by Linus Torvalds), it all feels pretty familiar to me. We’ll see how we go. I am still keeping my email at fastmail, so I can always switch back if it doesn’t work out.

In itself, de-shopifying might not change what I do, here in the studio, one iota. But it might.

As artists, we all like to think that how we work is not really determined by financial concerns. Or even by the idea that someone else might OWN the piece that we are working on. We would like to think that this is insignificant to the way that we approach the work’s development. I wonder if this is entirely true though. I find myself wondering in some subtle ways how the work will be viewed by others, and this makes me potentially self-conscious, and could well affect the way that I work.

Its not a big jump to the suggestion that taking out any financial considerations might be somehow liberating.

Now that this website is not clearly linked to the process of selling work, I hope that I can explore this new ’freedom’ and I shall be monitoring (as far as I can) any effects this has on how I work. And the results of that work.

I have decided to remove the shop pages from my website. This is part of a big rethink of what I am trying to achieve, and where to go from here.

When I decided to add those pages, about this time last year, the main objective for me was to make new connections with people who, I hoped, might like to own work and thereby connect more directly with what I am doing in my painting world. It was never about making money out of the work. When people were directed to my site at this time, they showed great interest, for which I was (and remain) extremely grateful. It was a period of some joy for me, knowing that people were actually looking closely at the paintings, albeit in photographs and not in real space (as might occur in an exhibition). That they might seriously consider paying real money for those paintings was gratifying.

However, it was just a moment, in the long continuum which is our lives! After I while, I realised that the interest would not continue unless I vigorously pursued it. We all have so much going on in our lives that we move on at a rapid pace, and our attention is diverted elsewhere. I also realised that I don’t have much interest in actively approaching people, though email, messaging or networking, in order to tempt them towards acquiring works of art. So I left the shop pages in case anyone was still interested, for several months, and then decided that not much further activity was likely to occur without further interventions of my own (which I wasn’t inclined to follow up). It was time to move on, and try another approach. The first stage of that process was to remove the pages, and references to them, from the website. I’ve now done that.

So, not really traditional autumn colours, but I am looking back to my drawings on paper for the start of this autumn, and the colours there are predominantly black and white. There is a tinge of brown in there too, though its not too obvious yet. I feel some hope that this process of trying to reproduce what I managed on paper, like this drawing (which I was looking at when I started the painting): will lead me back into a less tight and structured approach to painting on canvas.

The painting is only just started and may have a way to go yet.

It’s the last day of summer (here in Melbourne), and time to reflect on what I have been doing since the last post, in early January.

I’m still working over the canvas I had started then, but I’ve also added in several more of the same size, which I’m painting simultaneously, moving from one to the next in succession.

Here is the work photographed in the last post as it is today:

and here are the other ones I’m working on. They are all the same size (40cm wide).

Started this one a little while ago, but its good to get back into it. Not sure where this is heading at the moment, but that’s the fun of it.

width:39.5cm

I’ve just moved my website back to the Fastmail servers, so if you find a few glitches (eg. some pictures don’t automatically load on pages) try refreshing your page (usually with F5)

<– Blog 2021    Blog 2023 –>

 Blog menu