Competition time (and a print shop launch)!

The Last Time I Saw You (2020)

Hello all! Over on Instagram I have just launched a competition…To celebrate the launch of my print shop I thought we could play a naming game…

The first three images to be made available in the shop are (in order of appearance on the Instagram post), The Last Time I Saw You (2020), Event Site (for MJ Harrison) (2022), and Who Do You Do (2022). I’m not massively happy with the first title, so I’ll be giving away a limited edition print worth £70 to the person who can come up with the best alternative title for The Last Time I Saw You (that’s the landscape image) in the Instagram post comments for the next week or so.

The winner wins a print of the image of their choice.
The judge’s decision is entirely subjective, completely unfair and final. The winner will be announced in two week’s time.

About the prints:
All three images are printed with Lucia Ex Pigment by Canon on Hahnemühle Agave 290gsm paper by Klein Imaging in Manchester in an edition of 200. Each print is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. Prints can be ordered from my shop (link in description, please do, etc) and can be shipped worldwide.
Every couple of months I’ll be launching a new print, so let me know if there’s something you see in my feed you would particularly like to see as a print! Thanks all!

Who Do You Do (2022)

Some developments…and an accident stag

Hello folks! I see it’s been about a year since I last posted – it was meant to be more frequent, but life got in the way in horrible ways. Anyway, here we are and I’ve decided to return in a rambling, semi-incoherent manner – I’m telling myself it’s a tip of the hat to the early days of blogging…

I’ve been listening to The Fall, Danger Mouse & Black Thought, and Bob Marley by the way, drinking lots of tea and reading music books…

9/10 Ends (Lone Guitar), And I Am Bereft, graphite and water soluble pencil and acrylic on artboard, 297 x 420 mm, 2022

I’ve updated my website, and will continue to post works etc to my instagram account, but I’m keeping The Future Is Papier Mâché for the rambling, incoherent diaristic stuff. Hope you’re all well and enjoying life.

Revisited Accident Stag, acrylic on canvas, 80 X 80 cm, 2018-2022

Glamberton – a new art magazine

Glamberton is a new electronic art magazine, featuring 19 artists from around the globe…more details tomorrow.

Entry #1: Look, Know

Living in the Gaps (Landscape study), digital construct, dimensions variable, 2019

As some of you may know, I’m a fan of the group, The Fall, whose chief creator Mark E Smith sadly died in January 2018. This post is named after a 7″ single which was released by the group in 1982. The image above has nothing to do with The Fall, except I suppose tangentially – I’ve listened to them so much their aesthetic must have seeped into my process somewhere…

The painting below on the other hand I did “for MES” – it didn’t start out that way, but it as it neared completion it seemed to fit…anyway…

Painting for MES, 2018, Acrylic paint and watercolour pencil on canvas, 80 x 80 cm

Diary Images

Spend so much of my time looking down nowadays…these were both taken in London in the first week of the year.

3rd January 2020

3rd January 2020

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Patti Fogarty

I’d like to dedicate this post to Patti Fogarty, who was a brilliant street photographer, portraitist and blogger (and one of the first people I “met” on WordPress). Her photographs were really something else – a celebration. I miss them and I miss her presence online. There’s a very nice tribute to Patti on Monochromia and you can see her work on her blog Nylon Daze.

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If you want to see other work, visit my Instagram here or my website here.

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HappyNY(6)

Landscape study (101119), digital composite, dimensions variable, 2019

Happy New Year to everyone who has supported TFIPM by reading, liking or commenting!

The intention for 2020 is to make this blog more like an online sketchbook, so along with the finished works and art conversations with David Cook, I’ll be posting ideas, sketches, diaristic photographs and portraits. Not sure of the exact format, but here we go…

The above is another example of my renewed interest in digital work – I seem to have strayed into the landscape format good and proper. There are paintings in the works as well.

In the meantime, here are a couple of photographs from just after New Year in Brighton, UK…

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If you want to see other work, visit my Instagram here or my website here.

All best wishes!

P(lkndfl;n)A(akjl;)RT F(la;kjd;)I(lkdln)VE

Landscape study (051119), digital composite, dimensions variable, 2019

A couple more examples…in a break from using images of Dorset, the background of the second image is Croydon Road Recreation Ground in Beckenham (where David Bowie performed at the Beckenham Arts Lab Growth Summer Festival in 1969).

Abandoned Bandstand, digital construct, dimensions variable, 2019

jp’jaer’ (part four)

Attempt, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 90 cm, 2019

For the next paintings I tried to move as far away from imagery as possible – where a shape suggested an object I painted it out, and waited for other shapes to suggest themselves. The idea was to make paintings which did not reference anything except the urge to make a mark and balance a colour composition.

The drawings followed a similar pattern.

And became a more regular output. For all sorts of reasons I needed to make smaller works and started thinking again about digital constructs…

Landscape study (241119), digital composite, dimensions variable, 2019

More in the next post…

(part three||||)

Painting for Nikki, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 90 cm, 2019

So (following on from the last post), I abandoned the underlying image in my paintings and improvised. It was a very different approach – more about colour composition and instinct. Painting For Nikki was the first to be finished.

At the same time I pretty much abandoned the digital composites and started drawing…

Magic Hand, pencil on paper, 2019

Magic Hand II, pencil on paper, 2019

More in the next post…

Jammed Exit (part two)

That’s How We Do Things #1, acrylic paint and watercolour pencil on canvas, 80 x 80cm, 2019

Having got excited about improvising on Cowl (see last post), I went back to the above painting, which I’d shelved and applied the same method. You can see the original digital construct the painting was based on here. Less of the initial image survived.

In the digital construct for the next painting Fissure, I deliberately left areas of the image blank so I had somewhere to improvise, while retaining a the skeleton of a composition.

Sketch for Fissure, digital construct, dimensions variable, 2019

But once I started improvising the composition became less and less sustainable – it collapsed under the weight of the paint marks; the imagery was being buried…

Fissure, acrylic on canvas, 90 x 90cm, 2019

More in the next post…

Jammed Entrance (part one)

Landscape study (201019)

In recent months my work has kind of gone full circle, so that I’m producing a lot of digital constructs again (as a way of thinking about possible paintings).

Visiting my parents in Dorset by train gave me the opportunity to snap the landscape and work in that format. It’s quite interesting to stretch out after working in squares.

Landscape (Stain), 2019

The painting being worked on in my last blog post about making stuff ended up looking like this…and underwent a name change…

Cowl, acrylic paint and watercolour pencil on canvas, 90 x 90 cm

…and the improvisational aspect of the process started to take precedence. The monochrome image suggested areas of colour, which led to the introduction of the vase shape and the snooker ball…

More on the paintings in the next post.