Alan Ansell: Painting With A Purpose

Still Here!

2011-06-07T13:17:00.005+01:00

Goodness me how time flies when you're having fun! It's been many months since I posted but I haven't been idle. True to say though that I'm unlikely to share the fruits of several months' worth of experimenting and rethinking of various aspects. However all this work did somewhat 'free' my mind from certain approaches and so I find that I went back to rework a painting from the end of last year. I have to say that I think it went quite well, so without much more to say, here it is:

Masked Ball II

More new work

2010-12-02T13:30:00.000Z

It takes more time these days to make decisions about finishing - the inevitable battle not to overwork (which I may have done slightly). Another larger format work (for me) 26in x 22in on linen. I have another painting related to this one which needs a lot more work, and three others currently on the go, with a further 8 paintings already planned... so lots to keep me busy. Watch this space!

Masked Ball

A New Painting

2010-10-27T11:57:00.000+01:00

Fishermen I

Just the one this time. As I've mentioned before, I've been busy working away and as a result, much is changing in termsof my ideas and aims in painting. Much of what I felt was 'worth' publishing here is going to now remain on the studio walls until it's either sold or repainted. In the meantime, this new painting is something I'm pleased with. I seem to have had the presence of mind, as the painting emerged from what began as an underpainting, to not impose myself on it too far and instead allow the painting to develop more of its own accord. I'm finding much in both the process and this painting to interest me and spur me on. Anyway, enough waffle from me. Here it is.

I've also had the great good fortune to be able to paint on properly supported oil-primed canvas - the very best medium (IMO) available and I do believe this contributes substantially to the qualities to be found in the painting.

I hope you enjoy it.

At last!

2010-10-13T09:17:00.000+01:00

It feels like such a long time since I last posted any work on here, but I haven't been idle in the interim. True that there have been a few issues commanding my time but not such that I have't kept at the painting almost constantly.

La Croix

When it came time to post some more images I did begin to feel that in fact, despite the fairly large amount of work I have produced these past weeks, I didn't want or need to show it all. I am posting three images here and there are certainly more to come but I think an amount of what I have produced has been largely to prepare a way forward and as such the work isn't really for posting here.

Enough of my rambling already. The first image is another of the reworkings of earlier work that had suggested itself as a candidate due to seeming "dull" and ineffective. It is quite a small little painting - about 8 inches x 5 (I'll dig out a tape measure) and was something I used to see every day. It has been repainted not just from memory but from a desire to get more umm.. "life" into the painting.

November Vines

The next image is also a reworking. I have a few doubts about this image in the sense that it doesn't now feel entirely "believable" to me, but I'm glad that I was able to approach closer to my feelings on the bright but chilly November morning two years ago when I produced it. Thanks to the lovely people at the vineyard who allowed us to work there.

Late August in the Tarn

The final image in this post is, finally, some new work ie something that is not a revisiting of earlier ideas but a new painting that has come from what I feel is an improved and more developed understanding of things. It is a view from the end of my drive - lovely place that southern France is. I waited until the sunflowers had faded and begun to droop and the fields had been harvested. I find the colours and textures of the earth far more compelling to paint than an endless sea of green. Now that autumn is approaching I will spend more time outdoors looking at the reds, pale ochres and whites of the fields and wait as the leaves turn from green to brown, red and orange. The air is very clear here through the winter and I enjoy painting outdoors on a fine day.

Comments on blog colours

2010-07-14T21:12:00.000+01:00

Would any of you please be kind enough to comment on whether you feel the original black background or this white one is better for viewing the images. I've received comments that the black makes it harder to 'see' the paintings so throwing it open to discussion....

Anyone?

Collioure 2010 pt 3

2010-07-05T16:31:00.000+01:00

And so

View to Argelès I

Like all good things our time in Collioure came to an end. The weather was on the turn and besides, the days of painting under the hot sun were exhausting. On what turned out to be our last two days in Collioure we went out in the late light to paint. This first painting was a new spot we found just above the camp site and was a good open space offering a variety of views. For some reason I decided to paint the one that seemed most challenging.I left some of the areas with the rough sketching because I felt I'd done enough to capture the scene and at that time of day the light starts to change quickly.

View to Argelès II

The next two paintings were done on what turned out to be our final afternoon in Collioure. When we awoke the next morning, grey clouds were threatening and in fact it was a weather front moving in bringing a week's rain. Anyway, that afternoon we returned to the beach to take up another favourite view.

View to Argelès III

The third painting was another view that I attempted last year. I wanted to see if my approach was much (or any) different. I'm not sure it was but I was pleased with the result, even though I feel this painting may need more time and a few more small adjustments:

Collioure 2010 pt 2

2010-07-04T14:03:00.000+01:00

And so the joy continued.

Chateau Royal II

We were now well into the swing of things - happily relaxing on the camp site by evening but painting furiously by day. After my little colour studies and the things that emerged from it, I determined to go back the next day and try to really 'cut loose' with it all, while Ken, inspired by Matisse's drawings of fishing boats held at the Museum in Céret, had decided he was going to spend the better part of the day drawing at various locations around the town. So, armed with paint, paper and a certain determination, I went back to the same spot with a larger canvas and produced the following painting - which is largely untouched since I produced it with the exception of some slight adjustments to the darks and a couple of marks in the water. This is another painting that interests me greatly.

Notre Dame I

By now I was feeling umm... not sure exactly - couldn't call it cheeky, but whatever it was I didn't want to stop painting so I simply turned my easel around to face the now rather iconic church of Notre Dame des Anges (iconic, for any of you who don't know, because of Matisse's paintings of this building while he worked in Collioure with Andre Derain and laid much of the groundwork for Fauvism). I had avoided painting this building precisely because I found it difficult to "find anything" for myself in it, but with the slightly reckless spirit that was upon me at the time (or was it the beer I wonder?) I whipped off a couple of small studies which, again with only the tiniest of adjustments, are exactly as I painted them and are now firmly among my favourite work from Collioure:

Notre Dame II

Back at last! Collioure 2010, pt 1

2010-07-04T13:46:00.001+01:00

Well it's been a while, but I haven't been idle. Lots to share in the coming days and weeks.

Cap Peyrfite II

First off then, before I start revisiting earlier work as seen through my constantly changing ideas, is to share some of the work I did with fellow artist and friend Ken when we returned to our favourite spots in Collioure to see how things may have changed during the past year. It is something I am coming to enjoy more and more - this idea of revisiting the sites of earlier paintings to feel how my responses have changed and to see the work that unfolds there and whether I feel the work shows signs of forward development.

So without more ado, a painting. This was the first spot we went back to and although I did paint a further study on site, I don't feel it should be shared. Call it a failure if you will. But this painting here was my first real sortie into the landscape in probably two months or so, so I wasn't surprised to find it a bit cramped and choked, even if I did subsequently rework aspects of it in the studio.


Cap Peyrfite III

We spent the best part of the day there, despite the high temperatures and towards the end of the afternoon I found myself able to produce a much 'looser' little study which, despite its problems, I find points towards my growing interest in and understanding of the possible realtionships between colour, surface and form. Here it is:

Chateau Royal study

After this day in the heat we decided to work closer to Collioure and in and around the port. Now that we had been on site for a couple of days and I was feeling in the right mood for painting, I began to 'let my hair down' a bit more and was interested to find myself producing the following colour study of the grand Chateau Royal situated right on the quayside.

Chateau Royal I

Encouraged by this study I decided to produce a larger painting of the same subject. This was also very interesting and fun to do although I have significantly reworked it since bringing it into the studio, but not so much that I feel I have lost any of the important spirit of the painting.

Back soon....

2010-05-06T19:08:00.001+01:00

just a very brief post to let you all know that I've been moving house this past month. Am now pretty much installed at a new address where the hugely exciting NEW STUDIO space is coming together.... can't wait!!

I hope to get the brushes out again soon and be back to sharing my latest efforts with you here.

More of the new

2010-04-07T14:29:00.002+01:00

I decided to post separately rather than mix up older and newer ideas in the same post.

Here are two new paintings - both of which I began around the turn of the year but have been working on, on and off, these past months. I know the first one I posted in an earlier version. To say that it's now finished might not be as accurate as saying that for the moment, I see no great need to keep painting. I have read much about painters ruining their work by keeping going when in fact, they might do well to stop and think. Having that doubt now introduced, I tend to err more on the side of caution unless I am perhaps working plein air and feel that I need to keep going and have some more definite goal in sight.

Pont St Michel VI

Here's the painting:

The second painting is something born out of all this playing around with err... well ideas I guess. It feels a bit crude and I admit that it isn't anywhere near fully clear to me what I was aiming for, but having done it I can now see a way towards a newer version which picks up on some of the themes in this one. That is one way of making progress: in this experimental and incremental manner.

Pont St Michel VII

It seems I lied...

2010-04-07T13:37:00.018+01:00

...well not exactly lied, more the case that when I said that I wouldn't be doing any further reworking of older paintings, I obviously didn't mean it.

Here are two more and - dare I say it again? - possibly the last of the re-workings of older paintings. I tend to regard current works as "in progress" thus any additional paint on them is more a continuation of process. Oh dear, perhaps I'm just getting too stuck in a need for constantly defining what I'm doing.

Anyway, here's the first. It is a painting I did last summer on a VERY hot day. I seem to recall we were having something of a heatwave and although I'd begun this painting a couple of days previously with a group of friends and fellow artists, I needed to get back to site before the countryside changed too much. The day I went out onto the high corniche, it was over 38 degrees... not hot for some perhaps, but as a pale-skinned northern European, it was plenty hot enough.

View From the Corniche

I haven't made huge changes in terms of the colour or amount of paint I've put on, and indeed having been quite pleased with the painting at the time, I was hesitant in changing it. I suppose it's too easy to think that a painting is "fine" whereas this may simply indicate that I've failed to take any further lessons from it. Maybe there were none to be had. But I did decide to change small parts of the painting to re-emphasise my original vision of it, which it seems got lost in the subsequent painting. Of course whether what I have now created is any closer to any 'actual' scene, or whether I am simply allowing myself to indulge in further fantasy (no sort of a bad thing, mind you) remains for me to consider. Looking at it now I do tend to feel that I have no need to touch it further although I also realise that with the sands of perception so constantly shifting, such a statement might come to mean very little.

The second painting is a third repaint of a scene from late summer last year. Again it has been adjusted according to what I remember of my vision of the scene at the time and again - I may just be moving further into my own little colour fantasies - but that's okay because that's really where I've been wanting to head for some time now. I feel it's a case of needing to "do the work" of a certain amount of more literal renderings in order to provide the ideas from which to approach a more structured attempt at imagining - if that doesn't sound too much like a contradiction. Here it is:

Road to Le Verdier

Another Reworking

2010-03-26T11:50:00.007Z

This is what I feel is likely to be the last of this recent tendency to rework earlier paintings to conform more closely to current thinking. I do have my painting of the view from the Corniche - which I have posted in its last 'finished' state - on my easel at the moment, but again, I think these paintings are going to come to an end as the weather has improved, the grass is green and certainly the outdoors is calling once more...

But it's not only the weather. I keep thinking that there is only a certain amount I can do with a painting that was 'seen' with a particular mindset and is now being 'improved' through another. I might take from this that I am simply moving from one set of constraints to another - and that this is finally then a sideways movement and not a 'forward' one. Or, as I suspect and like many artists, I remain afraid to really attack a painting which still 'works' at some fundamental level. This is something that sits with me more and more, but in accepting this, I am then driven to go and make new paintings with this in mind, rather than attempt any feeble or timid re-workings of earlier work....

So - here is the painting. As I say, I think it's gone about as far as I wish to take it. Once the other paintings I'm reworking are done, I will be getting the paints out into the warm and sunny countryside to start this year's outdoor work, curious to see whether this winter in the studio has brought about any worthwhile or interesting changes.

Fields at Itzac II

I nearly forgot

2010-03-23T12:00:00.000Z

Owing to computer breakdowns, I managed to get my image archive split across several machines. I 'found' this photo recently of an earlier painting that I, again, reworked. In fact I went about the 'obliteration' of what was on the canvas by washing over the background first. As I did so, I noticed (not surprisingly) the subjects themselves become more prominent. So I changed course a little and reworked the painting as it then looked, rather than continue with my original idea (which was to overpaint the entire thing and effectively start again). I'm rather fond of my well-travelled ginger jar as pictured.

Anyway, I think it stands up to posting here - despite some slight reservations about some of it...

Still Life with Ginger Jar

more of the same...

2010-03-23T11:48:00.000Z

One of the paintings I posted recently, which I was still working on, has had more paint.... This particular painting feels more of an 'organic process' than any other. Due to the longer drying times enforced by using thicker paint, I find that this painting sits in a corner of the studio, while I continue working on other themes, and I seem to develop different feelings about its various parts as a result. So this is the latest application and to me it seems as if some different sense of things is emerging - whether through the timescales involved or whether due to my ideas actually changing overall is hard to tell.

Anyway, here it is for the sake of comparison with the earlier version. I think at this rate, it's probably going to be another couple of weeks before I can go back and add more paint...

Pont St Michel VI (in progress)

The old villages of the Tarn...

2010-03-19T15:23:00.000Z

... are charming in that "picture postcard" kind of way. Living here, one rather tends to treat them simply as streets - full mostly of old buildings and a certain quaint decrepitude.

Anyway, these are my surroundings so they make as good a subject as any for my continuing exploration. This latest painting is a theme I've addressed recently and this particular version of it is something I originally painted around three months ago and have just reworked. I don't have a great deal more to say about it really, it is what it is....

Rue Cahuzac V

On The Easel at the Moment

2010-03-09T11:34:00.001Z

I felt like posting a couple of pictures here showing two of the paintings currently on my easel. They are paintings made to try to develop some of the ideas that seem to be somewhat fighting for attention in earlier works. For me, posting them here is a way of defining them at some level and gives me an opportunity to think about them further.

This first one is actually a reworking of a painting I did last year, which itself was a studio study of a view of my village. Since I no longer see the use of keeping "bad" paintings lying around - and since there is distinctly less to be gained from allowing unsuccessful paintings to go unchallenged - I decided to attack it.

Castelnau Fields III

The results, as I stopped to let the various paint layers harden, began to interest me inasmuch as they allowed me to reconsider the idea of what a "finished" painting might be and how one goes about making a certain statement. At this stage, I am still undecided about whether to make further small changes, or whether to leave those things less resolved, simply because doing so will continue to provide a spur for further painting.

The second painting is even less "finished" than this first, simply because it began as an attempt to be much more rough - aggressive if you like - with my approach to the subject. So I got to site, and really just threw the paint on, deliberately making a "mess" of things, quite a lot of thick paint applied with a palette knife. The reason the painting is interesting to me know is that while leaving what I had considered to be this "first pass" to harden - which has taken several weeks now - I have gone on looking at it in the corner of the studio, and come to feel more and more that perhaps I have already said what I wished to say. So again - this is not about trying to paint "up" to some academic standard, but a stage in a journey that is leading me further and further into my own values in painting. Of course there are a number of 'issues' with this painting, but the interesting question for me is what to do about those issues. Anyway, here it is. This is quite a large (for me) canvas, so the marks are much larger than my usual - made with a big brush and a palette knife.

Pont St Michel IV

And two more

2010-02-17T13:44:00.001Z

La Besseyrie - evening

I conceived and painted these two studies as a pair, back at the end of last summer. Since then they have both been revisited several times, with the morning painting proving the more problematic. Now that I feel I've satisfied myself with them (for now) I thought I'd repost them both - they being a pair. I may now decide that one of them needs more work, but again -these things are often a matter of time and reflection - there finally being nothing I would accept as "objective truth" about the scenes in question (beyond perhaps some empirical measurements) since the paintings concern themselves with feelings and impressions, rather than the shifty concept of "truth".

Anyway, before I waffle on... here they are:

Not surprisingly, this one is the view painted towards the end of the day. This was on a hilltop near the historic town of Conques in the Aveyron. In late September, the sun is getting low in the sky by around 7:30 pm, so plenty of time to analyse the scene and make some comparisons

Here in this second painting - of the morning light as the sun rises out of the valley and burns away the mist - it is now striking the buildings and the far hills. I think this one is going to have to go back on the easel though.... not so sure about it now.

La Besseyrie - morning

And now....

2010-02-16T15:36:00.000Z

The two paintings here - both of which are small studies - are part of what might be emerging (in a more fully developed sense) from some of the playing I'm doing in the studio at the moment. Creative play is important - without it well, who am I to really say, but it does help to shift old ideas aside and allow new ones, or new versions of the old ones, to grow in their place.

So the first of these is a study I made a couple of weeks ago, where I was deliberately working quickly to just lay out the basic elements of a painting. I then realised this would provide a suitable subject for further experiment - resulting in the painting shown.

Still Life with purple stripes

The second of today's post - a short one for a change - is following some of the thinking from this still life (along with a fair number of works that are not shown here) and I was interested in this study because as I laid it out and began working on it, with a 'clear' idea in mind of what I wanted to put down, I became distracted for a while. When I returned to the easel, I was interested to see and feel that in fact, I didn't think the painting needed any more work. In the end I still couldn't resist going back one more time - that fatal visit - and maybe I've slightly overdone it. But I'll live with it for a while and maybe repaint some white in there, or maybe just leave it as what it is - an idea. But I felt it important to notice that I can say something with less, rather than insisting that I cover all of the picture surface. What I gained from this study is being fed into a couple of larger works that are going on at the moment and which I might post here later.

Pont St Michel V

Revisiting old Friends

2010-02-16T15:27:00.001Z

Well, although I feel that my interests are widening and that as such, I might not feel quite so 'attached' to landscapes as previously, I still feel like revisiting earlier work when I think I can move it further toward my vision at the time. To that end, I've made just small changes to two paintings from last year - perhaps the changes are too small to be noticed on some monitors (what with their limitations), but still I felt like posting them. Not too much to say about them really - they seem pretty obvious, so I'll just bung them up:

Sunset towards Argilès

Clouds over Argilès

Backwards and Forwards

2010-02-11T15:51:00.000Z

Up and down? In and out? I dunno - I just felt like calling this post something other than "more paintings"....

So moving straight on with the show, here's the first of this batch. This painting is also a scene in Collioure and it was painted from memory rather than set up the easel on what I seem to recall was quite a grey and chilly day.

This painting has been overworked a number of times into its current state. Further to this, I then produced a second, somewhat smaller study, in which I wanted to be free to explore the motif without concerns for any existing marks. Although this second study is quite rough in terms of colour, I did find qualities in it that were absent in this, a much more 'worked' painting. The two paintings then fed back into each other - a very useful practice. I have now decided to play around a bit more with the blue in the second study, even at the risk of it becoming far more "unrealistic" but simply because "having more blue" seems like a perfectly fine idea. Anyway, this is the picture:

Now I return to exploring something that I showed a few posts back with the winter snow scene, only this time in the studio and with a still life. I am interested in the way black acts and felt that it was quite fine to slash some right across the middle of an otherwise quite ordinary still life. The painting was done with this in mind.

There is a little bit of adjustment needed around the base of the vase, but I will get onto that in the next day or so. Fundamentally the painting will remain as shown here. There is a further still life that grew out of this painting but which is as yet not finished enough for me to want to show it.

Moving Forward, or Round in Circles?

2010-02-11T15:06:00.000Z

I can't say I'm really sure of the answer.... one minute it feels as if I'm getting hold of something and the next - that I've never really understood anything about painting from day 1. I guess that's the way it goes really - I'm certainly not alone in feeling this way. Still, it's important sometimes to just show up and keep working. Other times it's important to know when to rest and allow things to settle and other things to emerge from the chaos. Let's get the first painting of this post up shall we? Here it is.

I did say in a previous post that I felt this painting had further to go and it seems I found the reason to move it forward by desaturating and lightening some of the colour, while still enjoying discovering more about the use of the palette knife in helping to create texture. I still couldn't say that this painting is finished but it certainly helps to think about whether it is in a viewable state at all, even if I do subsequently rework it. And besides, this is really my reason for posting on the blog - because it's all just a matter of wanting to share what I'm doing and not, to produce paintings of any specific sort. The more I work, the more I start to sense boundaries shifting or dropping away, to reveal that they were actually limits I had placed upon myself, rather than being something one "can't do" in painting. So it's all very absorbing stuff as far as I'm concerned.

So here's another painting from a recent batch. I actually painted this last November, just before a small show I had locally. It is painted directly over a slightly different painting of the same subject. It is the same viewing point but after having struggle with the underlying painting for probably months, I decided that what I really needed to do was to let go of all ideas about the subject up to that point and to 'obliterate' the underlying image rather than simply start a second version. So as I worked with lots of white, with small amounts of Prussian Blue and a few other complex pigments, I decided that I rather liked the mess I'd made here and rather than push the painting any further, I would live with this for a while and see how I continued to feel about it. I'm still finding it interesting so currently feel no need to do any more work on it. Which is more than I can say for this next painting. This is a reworking of a painting I did last year while visiting Collioure with a painting buddy, and where we spent many a happy day setting ourselves up painting around both Collioure and the surrounding towns. Although I feel I've improved the painting now, I feel a little as though more work, although the painting might still be persuaded to look 'more like' the scene it represented, essentially by using some "rules of painting" - it wouldn't be honest to myself. I tend to feel that it's more a matter of my focus having changed/developed somewhat and that I will go to revisit the scene later this year and find out what happens when I now look at the scene. I think I have to accept that this painting was as good as I could make it at the time, and that it's okay to accept it for what it is, and allow new painting to be just that. Anyway, it's not exactly a horror.

I think I'm going to post these three now and then set about adding some more in another post. I don't like to try composing long posts with multiple images in them....

New Title, New Approach

2010-02-06T11:14:00.001Z

That's easy to say it's true, but no point in being backward in coming forward - to use an expression I borrowed from someone else....

So - from today, no more nonsense about whether it's "figurative" or "abstract" or any such meaningless distinction (meaningless at this precise moment in time. I may mean a great deal next week). I am going after something, of that much I'm sure. I feel increasingly as if this is like stalking some timid but powerful beast.... we move patiently and it begins to reveal itself.

It's okay - I'm not on drugs (yet!)... but I feel constantly motivated to express myself in terms that are more "of myself" than simply repeating existing dialogue. Hope that makes sense.

The second of two

2010-02-02T08:52:00.000Z

Here are the rest of the paintings of a recent batch, that I decided to post in conjunction with those of yesterday. I suppose I would call them related because they have been a part of the same attempts to set different limits on things like colour relationships and mark making, as were the works posted yesterday, but in a slightly different context. It should be immediately obvious that in the first two of these paintings I really went about things in a quite direct approach. Anyway, without more rambling, here's the first:

I don't think there's too much in the way of subtlety here - just some desire on my part to see if I could 'overdo' things. I did and yet I didn't, if you see what I mean. Not much else I can say about it really. Here's the second:

Again I don't think there's too much I could say about this painting. I went at it in what felt like a rather crude manner yet was suprised to notice, when I'd finished, that I seem to have "got at" something in a more effective way than had I been quite as careful and painstaking as I usually am when out in the fields (in fact this was a studio painting entirely). So, more things to think about if you ask me. The final painting in this post is a more straightforward effort, made while the snow lay all around us early in the New Year. Again, this painting feels significant because of the decision to use the dark stripe and this is an idea that I have taken into some of my other work - indeed it fed back into some of the work I posted yesterday, as well as leading to something I am about to go out into town to try out, just as soon as I've finished this post! Here it is:

So I hope you enjoy these, and I expect to be back again before too long with some more stuff.

Still busy: The first of two more

2010-02-01T12:34:00.000Z

Hi there happy campers, well it's no news to me at least that I'm still busy as ever, brushes whirling in the studio. We've had some snow too - much like many of you - but fortunately the good old southern weather is doing us proud currently - no snow in sight and bright sunshine by day. Still, this isn't a weather blog, I thought it was all about me talking about me!

Here is some fairly current work. It might look surprising to some of you, especially since it seemed I was settling into painting the landscape (well, maybe that's just my own preconceptions actually). Whatever the true case, these paintings are part of a 'finding out' that I've been doing and will continue to do, for reasons I'll go on to mention in part. This first painting is based on a local scene and one which I set out to paint last summer, in the (I now realise) naive belief that it would be another of these 'simple' matters of look, respond etc. As it turned out, the problems I experienced with subsequent re-workings of that initial sortie, followed by several site visits for more drawings, were to push me into thinking about painting in a different way. I like to take note of the things that bother me while painting, they seem to lead to much more interesting ideas than the 'obvious' in painting. All of my painting is currently an attempt to estabish a form of response to the subject that feels more connected to my inner life than of intellectual ideas that I fear too often can strangle the life out of painting. Nor am I particularly interested right now in discussing whether or not those two seemingly disparate urges might be one and the same thing. That being said, there are artists who thrive on a deep and overriding intellectualism, I just don't know if I'm one of them. Still here is what happened when I told myself that it just wasn't good enough to produce rather second or third-rate paintings of landscape. It may get some reworking in which case I'll repost it, but more likely I think it's going to lead to a new painting of the subject with a more worked out approach, based on the ideas that have been gestating here.

For this second painting, the obvious thing to do seemed to be to aim for some form of 'natural' colour and apply some of the ideas from the first painting to what might otherwise be a more literal approach. I realise that I have deliberately 'over-egged' the colour but in subsequent renderings (there is going to be a new version started tomorrow) I shall deliberately understate the colour. I should also say that all of these paintings tend to feed back into one another, so these have been worked on almost constantly over a period of a month or more. There are current paintings on the easel (yes, at least five or six more that aren't yet ready) that feed from these ideas and sometimes feed back into them weeks and months later. In fact I'm about to rework some of the paintings from last summer now that I feel I've gained sufficient distance from them to look at them afresh. Anyhow, there's one more painting in this particular little series:

Not surprisingly perhaps, this is another even more straightforward rendering only this time, I'm thinking about some of the things I'd discovered about paint application and surfaces that had come about from working with a palette knife. I don't think it's a particularly successful painting on a number of important levels - the quality of the light being one of them, but again, I am posting these here as examples of what I'm getting up to in my daily painting. There is no attempt to make a "certain kind of painting" from them, rather follow some inner and more elusive instincts about painting.
So I hope you enjoy these and there are more paintings ready for posting that will have to wait for a bit later, but they'll be up shortly. I realise it seems almost ludicrously difficult to solicit comments on a public website, but as always your opinions are welcomed.

Second one today!

2009-12-20T12:31:00.000Z

The paintings in this post follow on from those directly below - in a chronological sense - although they are generally more 'experimental' in nature. They should be considered as work in progress, since although many of the major elements of each painting seem to be in place, I am still thinking about any small colour nuances. They also came about after I was fortunate enough to be given a considerable quantity of professional oil paints, thus freeing me from any problems of trying to eke the paint out too far - something that I fear many artists suffer from when financially challenged. The paintings seem to me to have a slightly different feel to them and have in some cases been simplified while in others, I am thinking about how colour might be brought to work with less direct relationship to form. This is a tentative idea that requires considerably more work before it might bear proper fruit. Further to these paintings, I have three studies I've just put aside for ten days or so, that may or may not be another small step forward with this idea. There may be more that I find to comment on with these paintings but with the festive season fast approaching, I am about to down brushes for a short break and so will just post these images here for you to view, and see how I feel about them when I return to work.

Before the Christmas break....

2009-12-20T12:19:00.002Z

I've not posted for quite a while - not exactly sure how long, I don't tend to keep track of time in a linear fashion. I have been just as busy as ever and have quite a lot of new work and reworking of existing paintings.

I had a small exhibition with a friend at the end of last month and the preparations for the show - a great deal of framing, preparing the exhibition space and the said reworking of a fair number of recent works - kept me extremely busy. It seemed that with just a couple of weeks to go until the show, I began to confirm what felt like a fairly significant change in my ideas about colour on the picture surface, which caused me dissatisfaction with recent work as something I was unwilling to hang in its then present condition. There is a quite a number of images I feel like posting, so I am going to split it into a couple of posts.

Here are four paintings that were posted here a couple of posts ago and that have since been reworked. Some of the changes are quite large, others are much more subtle. This is a local view that I see every day on my way into the office. The following paintings are all local scenes - either close to the studio, or of my village in the evening light.

I've been busy

2009-10-11T15:41:00.001+01:00

Since my last post I've been around and about a bit - doing a bit of dog/house sitting, culminating in looking after friends' cats for the past ten days where I had full use of the studio. I made some small alterations to these first couple of studies I made while up in the Aveyron region (near the historic town of Conques). The first of the paintings is here:

I would have thought the image fairly self-evident, so no need to say a great deal about it really. Since I was to spend four days in this rather idyllic spot, I spent my time observing the passage of the sun across the sky and noticing how the forms changed with the light. I then set about my second study of the same view, done at a different time of day (in case you couldn't tell).

The third painting here was done several days later. I have been working on some studio based paintings for the past week or more and they aren't sufficiently advanced at the moment to warrant posting here. But this third painting was finished in the studio, based on my memory of the light and its effects on the landscape, rather than any attempt at a literal rendering.

There doesn't seem to be too much to else to say about this work at the moment. This being relatively early days for my blog, I'm (understandably perhaps) not receiving much in the way of comments, so it's difficult to feel it important to go into any further detail about how or why I chose to work in the way I did/do. As also mentioned above, I am currently still working on some interior/decorative type paintings which are more concerned with surface and colour and which, dependent on whether I deem them successful or not, may make their way onto here.

Enjoy.

It's late September...

2009-09-29T11:51:00.000+01:00

..and I really should be getting back to school - at least that's what the song said (name that song anyone?)

The weather down here in the southwest is absolutely fantastic (unless you're a farmer of course) and we're still having beautiful warm, sunny days, which is great news for outdoor painting. The evenings are just starting to turn a little chilly but I imagine it's still going to be another month or more before we need to start thinking about heating...

Anyway, this is supposed to be painting talk, not more of the 'English obsession' about the weather. The first two of these paintings I did a couple of weeks ago now and were following on from the three in my last post. This is more of the thinking about things as areas of colour and of starting to explore ways in which colours affect each other on the same surface, than they are about any attempt to be literal or 'accurate' (a rather slippery idea at the moment) about things.

So here's the first: I remember just getting in the car and driving until something caught my eye. I then stopped beside the road and set up, spent a little time looking (never enough time currently.... things to make note of) and then started responding with the paints. It's been retouched a little in the studio but I want to try to avoid things looking overworked. This is not actually because I suffer from any misguided notions about 'style' of painting, but because for me currently to want to work up an idea into a high level of finish and detail would be to destroy or cover up those very things which provide me with food for thought - so the work stays 'rough'.

Same with this second one really. After my stop beside the field, and deciding to venture a little further afield, I drove off towards Cordes. I saw this little scene sitting quite innocuously by the side of the road and turned the car around, parked and again just went after the colours - especially the idea of a very blue sky.

This last one is from last week. I was happy to have a couple of friends come and visit and although a projected trip up into the Lot didn't happen, we did go and spend an afternoon down by the river. Once again I decided to look and respond rather than spend time choosing some specific scene. I am still very focused on finding ways - different ways - of challenging habits and assumptions in painting (my own). One way of doing this is to avoid going out to find something of a common theme and instead use a more 'gut' reaction - in a moment - to decide to paint something. For me, if something can be got out of the scene in terms of painting, then it has been a useful exercise and useful learning experience. Again, this was worked on site for a while and I put in (again rather crudely but deliberately so) the main elements. I then spent a couple of days looking at it and deciding whether and which parts I should change slightly. This is one of those paintings that is 'finished' purely by virtue of the fact that I don't currently have any need to take the ideas further. As with most of my work, it is often the case that I may revisit something in several months and feel differently about it and hence decide to change it again but for now, this is it... This work is oil on canvas as opposed to the top two which are on paper. As always, comments welcome...

And the next one is...

2009-09-11T18:55:00.001+01:00

Hello again. Well, I can already see that this isn't going to be a weekly affair.... but since the last posting I have been busy and out and about, helping friends and the like as well as keeping busy with the paints.

I have been working on a number of paintings over the past week or more and although I indicated that the colour studies in my first post were possibly pointing the way to something else, and although I did then do considerable work on that something else, I have decided not to post it here for the time being. I feel that despite my interest in such projects I didn't finally have enough real understanding for me to really believe the work was going anywhere 'true' to the inner voice that we must learn to obey. I'm particularly keen to avoid simple effects or mere surprise value to stand for committed painting so instead I have decided to keep chipping away at the landscapes. These are three that I painted just over a week ago, all on the same day. They have been back in the studio and I've been working on them, making small adjustments. I think that in deciding to avoid gimmicks and trying to continue responding in what feels like an honest way, I have still gained something from the preceding paintings, from seeing all those colours jammed together on the surface and for sure, I may well go back to those paintings when the time feels right. For now though, here are some oil studies done on canvas paper - around A4 size if you're interested.

The first one above was a view I saw from the car so I parked up and got the paints out. As I was working I noticed that just to my left was another interesting view and since this exercise was all about just responding in a less 'constructed' manner, that one went down as well.

After those morning sessions I stopped in the afternoon but since I particularly enjoy the late sunshine at this time of year, I got back in the car late in the day and made my way down to the edge of the village to a spot where I've done quite a lot of paintings over the past months. Once again it has been back in the studio for some adjustments because I continue to find that although the plein air studies are a great way of improving observation skills, there are always issues with the change in light colour and intensity once we're indoors from full outdoor light. Since my work is intended to be viewed indoors I worked on it in small adjustments to allow for these changes. I'm hoping I didn't 'overcook' it and spoil the spontaneity of it all; I may decide to fiddle with it a bit more - I'm not completely convinced about the colours of the dying sunflowers in the middle ground there, but these questions can take time...

Anyway, that's me for now. I've got two more from Thursday to add but I'll do that in a separate post. Am off 'up north' for a few days from Sunday and will be taking the paints along.... hoping to stop by Rocamadour on the way and what artist could possibly pass such a place and not want to stop for a while?

Here goes - first post....

2009-08-23T12:13:00.022+01:00

Hello and welcome to my blog. I guess we all have to start somewhere and I'm starting here, with this.

Using a blog site seems to allow more flexibility and spontaneity than constantly updating a website, so I hope to use this blog in a more informal way to show you what's on my easel at the moment and to perhaps comment in more depth about what my aims for a particular painting might be or what I feel I have achieved or perhaps failed to fully understand. For me painting is like that - a matter of exploration, of trial and error and of finding out. Rightly or wrongly, I paint for myself and not for a market. I hope that time will show this to be the correct path.....

So, without too much further rambling, I include with this first post a couple of images that are still on my easel - well, perhaps not literally but they are still in progress. I am interested in trying to treat a subject as areas of colour and not as representing "things". It seems to be a difficult thing to do because of what I understand to be innate tendencies to think always in terms of concrete objects and to always want to place 'things' within a painting. Having said that, these are my first tentative steps in that particular direction and I feel that a lot of painting is experimentation.
The experiment may not finally demonstrate much but it is important to do it and besides, just this morning I found that while editing these pictures for posting, some solutions to the problems posed by these paintings appear to have suggested themselves, so I will be back at the easel shortly to continue working on them, whereupon I will post them again to show the changes. It is clear that in the first of these images I deliberately emphasised the drawing. I'm not certain that despite a certain effect this really helped me on my way, but like many questions we come to in painting, I feel I should live with the work and try to feel my way towards any answers rather than impose what I 'already know'. The second image was produced through my reaction to the first painting and is a considerably smaller canvas, which is difficult to appreciate when viewing on a computer monitor. These two paintings have already led the way to a third larger painting of a slightly different subject which is not shown here because it does need more work. Together, the three feed back into each other and help me to develop my thinking about the particular problem.

Not sure I've got much else I want to say about these at the moment. Of course your comments will be most welcome and should you not wish to comment publicly, you can always email me directly via my website.

Enjoy

Alan