Filling in the blanks

Argh, how much it annoys me and defiles my spirit, and aesthetic! To add white against dark... just let me wallow in the dirt and dark to roll beneath the low branches in the shade within the fleck of the forest floor Only then can I enjoy the view

No plein-air not for me I work from thought. Even so, the experience of making can be like the experience of being lost. To be an island alone in a room that is a studio Like in Solaris, paintings create living worlds that slowly become more like home despite feeling alien at the start.  An exercise in orientation, acceptance, and challenging the real versus the simulacra of things.

sometime worlds

The disruption of the surface through folds. A colour field made angular and pointy. I sometimes feel they should become flat paintings rather than painting-sculptures, deploying the artifice of trompe-l'oeil to fool the eye. But it's flat now on a screen; the real object more interesting up close. The idea of flattening these out to an illusionary spectre is less exciting, particularly as far as process is concerned. There is a tension expressed in this work that explores the essence of conformity versus freedom. The work wants to be unraveled, it's original rectangular boundaries disrupted and contorted as the initial established colour field ties to break free.

maybe, maybe not but good artist why not I was never a good painter because I didn't really want to paint what  a r t s k o o l  told you to  paint or was I even a painter? an education is sometimes rightfully about what not to follow but not really how to not follow... if you know what i mean particularly in the arts I only really started to want to paint things in a serious sense much later on, once I learned what not to paint, and why (still uncertain) BUT! the magic is in motivation - don't lose it! or at least don't worry, it comes back to you but you gotta catch it quick sometimes and have the means to do so, which isn't always easy.

(a suggestion of what might be) Artists I think of when I think about landscape include Richard Diebenkorn, Mark Rothko, and Richard Long. Richard Diebenkorn's Ocean Park series adopted a format that evoked the outer space of his Californian studio as viewed through his studio window, all lines and layered spaces of human suburbia, its topology flattened; distant space made close through surface-driven abstract painting. Mark Rothko produced some interesting and deceptively monochromatic works late in his career and are among my favourites of his. They appeared around the same time the Moon landings were broadcast on TV and like most Rothko paintings went untitled except for a description of the 'top' (as in, assumed) colours, which were 'black on grey'. Fittingly, most people who actually had a TV at the time were likely watching the Moon landings in black and white. These paintings evoke a sense of distant spaces brought closer together, the Moon somehow pulled ev...

Shukubu ,  Kazuo Shiraga (1924 - 2008) Shovelled land? Our environment? The self? Or land that has been altered in some way by human intervention? An abstract mass. Landscape can also describe regions of space that make up both our inner and outer worlds. It is mutable, not clearly defined. It has indivisible boundaries exerting invisible influences that are our connections to the environment. It has peaks and troughs and rivers that flow within and around it. We inhabit it, and it dwells within us and is part of a shared memory, both local and massive. T he experience of being in landscape leaves an indelible mark on a person, so I almost always work from memory and away from it all, separated off in a studio somewhere. Like land, paintings change over time. They undergo constant (re-)development. They become transient, a build-up of layers of lost spaces. The past gets obscured as the surface takes priority, processed via the serial influence of the preceding layers. These diff...