The last year

I can’t think of how many paintings that I have made over the last year. Last summer I started work on the nude studies, made loads of drawing, oil on paper colour studies and then began to seek out new imagery to work from. Frustrated by the limitations of secondary source material, I gathered my own visual research using Johanna as my model. Initial progress was promising as I had found a surface to work on that offered me lots of potential. A coated hardboard gave me a pristine white and the ability to wipe away my mistakes. Painting s followed paintings which had a real luminosity. I was excited by what the colour was doing!

Then I began to realise that this surface was not allowing the paint to adhere. The very property that I had used to remove paint, to give me a kind a kind of monotype effect was the very problem in that the paint was coming off, months after the image had been painted!

My initial reaction was one of panic and back pedalling. I reverted to acrylic and started working directly on board. These paintings were made in a hurry, their haste the result of so much misspent time working on unstable images.

The pace of the imagery gave the work immediacy, the colour became more muted and cooler. I realised that my source material was too clinical and I began to make collages out of the photographs, placing the figure against a coloured gestural plane. This helped enormously and allowed the figures to really develop.

A change of pace and a change of subject as I started work on the London paintings. These grew slowly and tentatively. Working with a restricted palette and painting on a dark ground, these paintings felt like they belonged to an earlier period. More like my first male nudes on black grounds these paintings relied on scumbelled veils of colour. I immersed myself in this dingy world to become seduced by reflections and rain. Again I sought new sources for inspiration and explored the same scene at different times of the day and season. As the momentum of these paintings slowed I began to pursue the potential that was presented by some of my small oils on paper. Whilst these were initially seen as sketches, I realised that they were more able to capture the spirit of the nude in colour and bring about a freshness of touch that had been missing in my work. These small paintings have been a success and I have strived to capture their same quality on a larger scale.

This is not always easy. Trying to enlarge a painting isn’t just about scaling up ones marks. There are other decisions to make. Should the enlarged painting be a copy of the smaller? Should the larger attempt to have the same economy of the former and if so, how much more strategic do you have to be? Does this then effect the energy and the dynamism of the imagery? Is something lost in the process?

As my work has evolved over this year I feel that I am beginning to get somewhere. I think that I’m beginning to feel much more at ease with oils and the latest oils on canvas have an ease and a richness of colour without being garish. I’ve discovered some new things which are, on the whole, practical things about using oils: preliminary colour mixing with a palette knife, making a large set of beautiful hues, using many more brushes which means that colour retains its vibrancy for longer. Using