Wednesday, August 31, 2016

A Digression



‘Yellow Submarine’
oil on canvas/16″ x 12″/August 2016
Scratching a little aesthetic itch over the last couple of days, producing an oil painting of an image processed in watercolour back towards the end of 2011 (please see here), a still life of the household’s ‘yellow submarine’ silicon leaf tea infusing device.

Friday, August 19, 2016

Tarry, Tarry Night...




‘Roadscape With Can (Study) #2’
oil on canvas/20″ x 16″/August 2016
Presenting a couple of images of the second study of a found flattened aluminium can (observed from life) upon/embedded within a thickly painted ‘roadscape’ based generally upon photographic evidence of the legendary ‘double black lines’ corrective road markings formerly to be seen gracing the streets of Flint. With acknowledgement of such a compositional device and source (the archive of photographs of being considered to be ‘found paintings’ of a modernist idiom) but liberties then taken, the materiality of the oil paint itself and its application becomes the subject. In this instance, what was the original ‘flecking’ of paint relating to the appearance and substance of tarmac (the lighter grey tonal areas) came to be considered as being perhaps a little too decorative or ‘Impressionist’, thus the brush was dragged over these marks in a series of horizontal and vertical movements to create more of a (very) loose grid structure, resulting in something grungier, possibly more befitting the subject matter and the source material.


Friday, August 12, 2016

Back to the Future (?)



 
‘Roadscape With Can #1’
oil on canvas/12″ x 16″/August 2016
 
Presenting today a first tentative exploration in oils of what might have the potential to become an evolving body of work, drawing on subject and object matter that’s long held a fascination and has, on occasions and considerable stretches of time over the past, provided substantial grist to the creative mill, with evidence having been photographically documented extensively and many objects collected to subsequently serve as the source material for a large number of drawings, which, along with the photos, populate the archives of TOoT.
 
Beginning with a wealth of images of what at the time (they’ve since been physically removed, scored-out) were the legendary ‘double black lines’ corrective road markings that were a feature upon numerous of the streets of Flint, North Wales (taken and blogged during February and March of 2006), and then developing into a series of drawings based on the found flattened ‘roadkill’ cans (over the period from March 2009 to September 2010), with also much more photographic evidence of such objects as discovered and observed in situ, these idiosyncratic road surfaces, ‘roadscapes’, and specific items of the discarded matter littered upon them have continued to percolate on the old mental back-burner until this point, when the recent finding and collection of a couple of suitable objects (discovered in close proximity to Wrexham FC‘s Racecourse Ground, thus incorporating a little football link-up to proceedings too) to serve as physical subject matter enabled this most recent oil painting to come into existence. The thickly painted ground is based generally on the appearance of the double black lined tarmac-surfaced roads, with flashes of the originally painted yellow lines beneath the corrective over-painting showing through in places, the can from observed reality, the whole being but a small study into the possibility of pursuing such a line of aesthetic enquiry.



Monday, August 08, 2016

And Again...


 

‘White Pears With Barry Stedman Vessel #4’
oil on canvas/16″ x 20″/August 2016
 
Continuing with the painterly exploration of the increasingly-familiar Barry Stedman vessel juxtaposed with a selection of the even more familiar whitewashed (re)model(led) pears, with, on this occasion, the vessel being observed with the plane first featured in version 1 of the sequence to the fore, its glazes of colour showing slight variations to those on the reverse, and also a variation in the configuration of pears to the right, with one immediately behind the pair to the front of the shallow recessive space, crowding them together in vaguely Morandi-esque fashion. As with the previous example, the underpainting was a thin sap green wash, the pale grey over it allowing a certain amount of tint and, hopefully, luminosity to glow through.