On Wednesday evening I went to see the opening of the Contemporary British Painters exhibition at the crypt gallery Marlebone Church. It was a lovely gallery in which to display the work and I enjoyed the evening. My painting, Wasteland was in the exhibition which runs throughout April.
Yesterday, a painting day in my studio. I’m looking forward to going out and about again to draw and paint but the atmosphere outside has been bad – news channels are reporting high levels of air pollution over large parts of the country including East Anglia – a combination of background pollution from cars, etc together with pollution blown in from Europe and dust from the Sahara. I have got a cough when I go outside. I don’t remember atmospheric pollution being this bad in Ipswich before. I went to London by train on Wednesday afternoon and it looked very smoggy around and in London. The news channels are reporting an increase in hospital admissions by asthma sufferers and people with lung conditions. When are we going to address pollution and climate change?
I made paintings of the sea using a part of one of my sketches of a high sea at Dunwich made earlier in the year as source material. The sea now, as well as being beautiful and a source of relaxation, is increasingly a more dangerous threat in the world – more and larger storms and tsunamis, higher seas causing flooding and affecting peoples’ homes, environment and employment. Therefore it seemed an appropriate subject as part of my project theme of the sublime and concern for the environment.
I used watercolour initially and flung water on the paper whilst controlling paint runs. Then I added more watercolour and acrylic colour until I achieved the effects I wanted. The main thing was to achieve the choppiness of the waves and a sense of the big roll of the sea. Now, High Sea is a very small painting and perhaps should be bigger to achieve more impact. However now that I have got the technique and effects I wanted I will make a larger watercolour/acrylic work on this theme.
It is probably worth mentioning the elephant in my studio at the moment. I have started oil painting. Initially roughed in with acrylics, I have applied oil paint to the structural shapes in the water of this large grey painting. The subject is structures and the sea. I also feel that it is appropriate that it is dark and gloomy and painted using oil – thinking about the forbidding aspects of the sea and pollution. I am not sure where it is going at the moment so I am just leaving it there annoying me for the time being….
The final two images here are of mixed media collages that I made at the end of March. I used a combination of masking tape, acrylic paint and oil pastel in making the images which follow on from the work Sea Structure 1 discussed in a previous blog. I do not feel that these images are as strong as the initial work but enjoyed exploring colour combinations in making them.
Today, the news carries reports of the findings of a UN panel on climate change. They are now definitely linking climate change to human activity and predicting increased flooding and heatwaves as the ice floes melt and the sea level rises. This, they say, will affect the environment, peoples’ lives and biodiversity. How did we let this happen? Can it be controlled now or is it already too late?
Today I was looking at some of the sketches of structures in my copy of the book Barbara Rae Sketchbooks. I enjoy the looseness, colour and line of her sketches which are made outdoors.
They inspire me to paint my own sketches outdoors using line and water-based colour both on Orford Ness and at the Dunwich coast. I’ve used pencil before but want to capture colour too.
Barbara Rae’s sketches are reproduced in the book Cork, R & Wardell, G (eds.), (2011), Barbara Rae: Sketchbooks, London: Royal Academy Publications.
Barbara Rae’s sketches may also be seen at http://www.barbararae.com/
Another place that seems to conjure the sublime for me is Dunwich with its strange contradictions e.g. the Sizewell nuclear power station and the Minsmere bird sanctuary. The work that I started based on the Gorse Walk at Dunwich Heath is of less importance to me now in this project and I want to concentrate on the rig structures near the power station (looking at the juxtaposition of these man-made objects with the sea) and also on the sea and shoreline. You wander away from society and this is what you see – the odd structures from the past and present, the nuts and bolts of our man-made existence and also the desolate, sublime, exquisite, dangerous planet. These are my themes.
The painting (top left) was based on a photograph of a tower structure in the sea off of Sizewell power station. I used masking tape to paint in the linear shapes initially. Some cropping of the image ensued (shown in the stages on the left) finalizing on only the lower part of the structure and omitting the horizon. In leaving out most of the structure I felt that the remainder had more impact because it is not self explanatory or “picturesque”. It is adjacent to the blue sea and interrupts it and that is the effect that I wanted.
