Rod McRae

Paintings

My painting story

8. Multiple sources

2004-06

I wasn't quite content to leave it there. I felt this painting needed something else. Its one of the most centralised images I've done and it reminded me of religeous iconography of the early renaissance, so I thought I would make it into the central panel of a triptych. To generate the side panels, I took a bunch of Durer etchings, and stacked them together in a grid. Then I overlaid one of my paintings and mixed the two using some of the built in tools of Photoshop. At this stage it looked like this.

I took two pieces of that last mixture, and did a few more manipulations, mixing in some elements of other paintings and I ended up with the left hand panel here — with the digital image on the left, and the painted version on the right.

And this is the right hand panel; again, digital version on the left and painted one on the right.

Putting it all together, I found a great contrast of mood between the sombre atmosphere of the boat in the middle, and the chaotic colourfulness of the side panels. That felt ok, though I think when I show it again, I will separate the three panels a little bit because it feels as if there's almost too much going on here, its too busy and a little too compressed.ps. having experimented with separating the panels, I've decided that the original tight configuration works best.

I keep on working on the computer, taking photographs of my surroundings and mixing them in similar ways to those I've been describing. This is just another way of injecting new subject matter.For this one, I started with photographs, mostly taken in my kitchen. The main image is another photograph of my two daughters who were posing just before a fancy dress party. This is more conventional collage than the other images Ive been showing you. The absolutely clear figurative side of this is taking me a bit of time to get used to and I haven't painted this yet.

Here, I'm still using kitchen things but what emerges is very ambiguous, both in terms of the forms and the space. There's a harshness in the black and white which is a little bit sinister, specially in those dark areas. This would be interesting to paint, because the dark areas can be made to be much more expressive.

Here are a few more digital images I've made. Usually its a combination of photographic elements and painted, or drawn ones. I like this combination, as it somehow captures my current split world, the digital on the one hand and the analogue, physical painted one, on the other. The work can progress through stages of both, starting out on the computer and then entering the world of painting proper.

I've also recently bought myself a fairly large-scale and good quality ink-jet printer. With this I can print the digital images in their own right, but what I really want to try is collaging printed material together with painted and drawn material. This would draw attention to the differences in the medium and just takes the whole process into another stage of development, bringing the two sides back together again. Its all about transition, but also synchronicity.

If you look carefully, you can see the sources of these images...Here I have used one of my paintings, called Gravity. The other part of it, however, you would find it hard to recognise... its a Mantegna which has been deconstructed, but it retains the elements of brilliant colour, and bits of forms that I wanted.

This is an odd one. I was trying bits of imagery I'd found on the internet, so there's this weird mixture of eras that seemed at the time quite funny to me.