Keeper of the Dark Garden

A tiny painting this one, just 11cms square, and, like my last post, owes much of it’s evolution to the recent holiday I had in France. There are other influences at work though, including a painting I really, really love in the Tate collection by Alan Reynolds called Keeper of the Dark Copse II, painted in 1951-2. You can see the painting on the Tate website here. It was created during the period of Reynold’s career when he was making images that increasingly abstracted the landscape; soon after the Keeper was made, his work moved into complete abstraction, never to return. This painting, though, is often linked to the British neo-romantic genre that flourished in the 1940’s and early ’50s. Certainly it includes several of the classic neo-romantic elements; an attachment to nature and landscape, brooding light, colour and tone, and in this case, an explicit manifestation of the ‘genius loci’ so beloved of painters around the time. What makes it a bit different is the greater emphasis on the formal elements of the composition and design, and the imposing of a stricter visual order which results in a painting that feels quiet but taught, to me, still, but energetic – I love it.

The other thread that fed into my little painting is an evening of photography in France with my friends Phil and Paul. Phil was experimenting with some long exposure shots at night in the garden of the wonderful old farmhouse where we were staying. Being deep in the country, it was very dark and spooky and the garden felt enchanted, or haunted.

This one is just acrylic painting on board and I put it in a frame I had lying around.

It’s a cheap, Ikea frame, good quality considering the price, but I want to try making my own finishes for the frames i’m going to use so I need to get some frames made to measure from a decent framer. I loved the rusted metal frame my friend Harry had had made for a collage of mine and I might try something similar, or simulate rusted metal effects with paint on wooden frames. More experimenting to do!.

The Garden at Barraud

Well I’m as caught up as anyone in Kate Bush hysteria this week so I couldn’t help but go a bit Hounds of Love with the post title. The image is another acrylic and coloured pencil piece based on the garden at Theresa and Stephen’s farmhouse at Barraud in the Dordogne where I had a lovely few days at the beginning of August. They’d been having some unusual weather for the time of year, warm, but very wet, with a lot of thunderstorms so the landscape was still very green and lush when I arrived. At the back of the house were some wonderful old oak trees, with a tangle of shrubbery and woodland behind. I loved the shagginess and chaos of all the foliage and wanted to try and explore it in some drawings.

I’m experimenting with some different approaches at the moment, to get myself into a groove (hopefully!) to create some work for an exhibition next February. I was interested in the denseness of the tangle of branches and the profusion of foliage here, so I decided just to throw some things at the paper (which i’d mounted on board so it would stand up to getting wet) and see what happened. I added some acrylic paint textures first:

Before working into it with some black, white and ivory coloured pencil and just  a bit more direct painting. I’m not sure whether i’ll carry on in this vein but i’m enjoying trying out some different techniques. What i’m struggling with at the moment is a theme or a concept for the exhibition to hold the work together. I know it’s not necessary, really, I can just show whatever work i’ve created, but I find it does help me to focus, and explore a particular idea further than i might do normally.

As for Kate, the reviews are fab and The Ninth Wave, or side two of The Hounds of Love, my fave Kate Bush album, is in the set list – I’ll have another listen and maybe get inspired with something for my exhibition!

The Red Church

It’s all gone a bit sci-fi again with this one. I’ve combined some elements from classic brick expressionist buildings I’ve seen around Berlin in the main church facade with three spires that I half remember seeing in some old sci-fi film from the ’70s , I think it was a Planet of the Apes film , though I could be wrong. Whatever it was, I remember in the film those spires were very sinister. I’m not sure what kind of church this is, and i’m not sure what goes on inside, but I guess it’s not Sunday School 😉

 Collage by Phil Cooper, sideboard designed by Harry Clark, interior design by Harry Clark

Ok, so it’s something we’re so often told if we’re producing artwork, ‘don’t throw anything away!’, but many of us have pretty limited storage space so stuff does often end up in the bin or the recycling just to make some room, as well as for other reasons, in my case things like ‘it’s rubbish, I hate it, I can’t paint, painting’s stupid, i’m taking up archery’ etc.

But I learnt my lesson this morning when I got an email from a friend in Berlin. Earlier this year, I had a go at using some of the collage techniques I like but on a larger scale. Most of the work i’ve been producing is around A4 and smaller, but in the spring I had some time off work so I thought i’d try going bigger. I worked on the piece, using a couple of ravens and some foliage as subject matter, for about two days and got it finished.

I stood back, tired, excited about working on a larger scale, looked at the finished work and went ‘oh, I don’t like it, damn’. I think the fact that it had a very different feel to my smaller works just threw me I couldn’t appreciate it the piece’s qualities. And that was that, the collage got stuck behind a stack of boards and I was planning to put it in the basement as it was quite big and got in the way. The basement is pretty much a halfway house to the dustbins as hardly anything ever comes back upstairs again to see the light of day.

Then, recently, our friend Harry Clark was round at my hubby’s and caught sight of the discarded big collage. He pulled it out and liked it, had an idea about how it might look on his wall and emailed me. I couldn’t believe he saw anything in it and was only too happy to see it go to a good home. Now Harry is a man of quite exquisite and imaginative taste, a gifted interior designer and furniture designer, and the fact that he had taken an interest in the reject collage should have alerted me to the fact that it did, in fact, have merit. He knew a good picture framer and had the piece beautifully framed in rusted metal, he then hung it in pride of place in his fabulous living room. Of course I should have trusted his judgement as when the photos arrived of the collage on the wall today it looked absolutely great and suits the spot where Harry has placed it perfectly as you can see in the pic at the top of this post.

Here are some more images of the framed collage looking very at home in Harry’s living room:

But enough about the collage, just look at that extraordinary piece of furniture Harry’s designed and had made, I think it’s absolutely stunning, and that  living room is to die for! He really is very talented (and his partner Matthias is a gifted painter too) and I’m proud as anything that my work is hanging amongst all those beautiful things! You can see his website here, although Harry tells me it is due for updating shortly. So well done Harry mate, for rescuing my collage, giving it a wonderful lease of life, and for teaching me a lesson I should have known anyway – never throw anything away!

I was away again last weekend, a complete contrast to my previous trip to the Dordogne; this time I was in Berlin, not the prettiest place, but a visually stimulating city where I’m never short of subject matter for my drawing and painting.

I’ve written before about the Südgelände nature park in Berlin which was created out of an old railway goods yard in Shöneberg. Various bits of obsolete railway ironmongery have been transformed into sculptures and scattered around the park. I came across these two hulking lumps of rusting metal that I hadn’t seen before, set either side of the path, facing each other like sleeping robots, creating a kind of gateway to walk through, they had real ‘presence’.

These recent little drawings and painting are an attempt to just get the creative juices flowing again after a few months of inactivity. I called these posts ‘sketchbooks’ although they’ve all been done on loose scraps of paper.    Many (many!) years ago, in my mid-20s I did some art courses at the City Lit college in London and one of the tutors there told us about how he drew on whatever paper was around and then took them all to a bindery to get them spiral bound into a book. This seemed like a very good idea, and a way of getting away from the blank pages of a conventional sketchbook, which, as well as being restricted to the same paper throughout, can also be a bit daunting when you open it up at page 1!

The Catch, by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, acrylic on panel, 2014

A new exhibition called The Sea, The Sea opens at Oriel Tegfryn in Menai Bridge on Anglesey next week to coincide with the Menai Seafood Festival.

You can see details of the exhibition and the specially commissioned pieces included in the show on the Oriel Tegfryn website here.

Some beautiful work in the exhibition, I’m especially drawn to Meri Well’s ceramics and one particular painting by my friend Clive Hicks-Jenkins called The Catch. I’ve often written about how I admire Clive’s work on Hedgecrows and posted links to his brilliant, inspiring blog, the Artlog. As well as being one of the very best artists working today in my opinion, he’s also one of the most generous and supportive, constantly engaging with and encouraging others and sharing so much on his blog.

I saw this new painting start to emerge on the Artlog a few weeks ago and I was intrigued from the first, tantalising post which included images of the sketches Clive has done as he started to develop the piece. After finishing the painting he wrote a superb ‘from start to finish’ post which really got under the skin of the image and gave a fascinating insight into how The Catch came to be; you can read the post here, I don’t think it can be bettered as far as this kind of process story kind of post goes.

I really fell for the painting, so I made an enquiry and I’m now the proud owner. Clive asked me to write about what drew me to The Catch and you can read what I had to say on the Artlog here. The painting can be seen in The Sea, The Sea from next week and then it will come to me and I’ll hang it in my bedroom next to Clive’s Dragon of Many Colours which I acquired earlier this year. I’m a very fortunate chap to have these wonderful pieces to enjoy 🙂 .

Since I wrote about the painting for the Artlog I’ve continued to look at the digital image of the painting daily and i’m now drawn to the sheet of flame which rises above the roof of the building at the top right of the piece. It’s almost directly in the fisherman’s sightline and i’m now seeing a powerful connection between those closed eyes, lost in some private reverie and that flash of fire. The painting continues to unfold layers of intrigue and fascination for me and I’ve no doubt it will continue to do so in the years to come as I live with it and get to know it better.

Inspiration and ideas do come from the oddest places sometimes. This sketch in acrylic and coloured pencil on tinted paper started life in the office yesterday – I was printing off a dreary document when the colour printer had a bit of a meltdown (probably brought on by my strategy document I was trying to print) and started to put bright green and turquoise stripes across the paper. It looked rather lovely so I tore off a piece and stuck it up on a board above my work table at home:

 I was wanting to do a sketch of the old well next to Theresa and Stephen’s farmhouse we were staying in at Barraud last week and the colour in the printer malfunction as well as the photographs I’d taken at the well reminded me of Graham Sutherland’s ‘Fountain’ paintings he did in the early 1960s when he had moved down to the south of a France and settled in Menton. It seems that Sutherland’s earlier paintings inspired by the Pembrokeshire landscape as well as his wartime work are held in higher esteem but I absolutely love the lush foliage and tropical colours of the paintings he did around his garden in France. Here’s  a link to some work online at the National Museum of Wales with some nice later works including some great paintings towards the end of his life when he returned to Pembrokeshire and re-connected with the landscape that had so moved him when he was first becoming established.

Funny how just a few days away doing something different can get the creative flow going again – I must do it more often!

This little sketch uses coloured pencil plus a wash and some blobs of acrylic. The subject is an old well I saw down in the Dordogne last week, I can’t remember exactly where, I’ll have to consult my mate Paul who I was staying with.

We were staying in a tiny hamlet called Barraud, no more than a few farmhouses and outbuildings, about an hours’ drive north west of Bergerac. Although we did drive out to nearby market towns, just that one old house and garden was so rich with life and with stories I could have spent ages there without going anywhere else and not have been bored for a moment. We sat around and mused about what it would be like to spend an extended period of time there, pretty wonderful I expect.

Liz King is somebody who does live in the region and you can see her wonderful blog here. I love Liz’s work and her blog gives a flavour of what it must be like to live and work in this beautiful part of France.

Back from holiday in the Dordogne, just a few days but it was such a treat. Many thanks to my friends Paul and Phil and especially Paul’s mum Theresa and partner Stephen who invited me down to their glorious old farmhouse in a tiny hamlet deep in the countryside. Time has a completely different quality there and I found myself unwinding as soon as I arrived. Eating fantastic food out in the garden, lazing by the pool, looking for tree frogs, wandering about taking photographs; days felt very simple but very enjoyable and satisfying indeed in such wonderful company.

Here’s the farmhouse:

And here’s a sketch of the house next door which had a great chameleon-like facade; drowsy with dryad loveliness in the summer sunshine, rather brooding and haunted at night:

Phil was experimenting with some night-time photography in front of the house one night. Some of the shots involved me skipping round with a giant foam pool-noodle and plastic sheeting for a long exposure shot so when Phil gets them developed i’ll post some up here, they might be interesting and spooky – or hilarious.

I was over in Berlin recently and the weather was wonderfully hot and sunny. Berlin is pretty much surrounded by natural lakes and most are used for bathing in the summer. My favourite is on the outskirts of the city in the Grunewald forest and is called the Teufelssee, or ‘Devil’s Lake’, I’ve no idea why. It’s great for swimming and sunbathing, surrounded by grassy banks and a backdrop of woodland. All kinds of people go there, from punks to families and older people and everybody is just chilled out and enjoying the place together. It has a great old-fashioned quality I find a lot in Berlin but that is getting harder to find back in the UK.

Anyway, I did a sketch of Jan lying stretched out on the grass and then another drawing. I did try a coloured pencil drawing but it soon went haywire and got binned although I will have another go.

I got snipping though and put together a quick collage – here it is left unstuck down:

I might use the composition to do some more work, but first a holiday in the Dordogne this week – hurrah!