
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).

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