The Opposite of Tomato: September 2018

Monday, September 24, 2018

Enmeshed Again...

In the zone after last weekend’s painting session, this Saturday and Sunday I continued the exploration of the subject/objects with an active contemplation of a second example of the recently-acquired pears in foam-mesh protective sleeves. On this occasion, a twist of the inner lining of tissue paper can be observed peeping up through the top aperture.

'Pear in a Jacket #2'

oil on canvas/35 x 25cm/22-23 September 2018

[detail]

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Autumnal Object

Having brought the summer project to a point not necessarily of conclusion but rather a pause for consideration of how and where it might develop, thoughts (re)turned to one of those subjects that just keeps on recurring.

Pears as objects have been a staple of my drawing and painting practice for over twenty years, since, in fact, I was a second-year Fine Art undergraduate at university. More recently, at various points during the last few years, I’ve been representing them in altered form, ultimately whitewashed and placed within white spaces, exploring their form in terms of tone rather than colour. Further back, early in 2006, coincidentally shortly after I’d launched this blog, I discovered in a local greengrocers what were termed Chinese ‘Ya’ pears which came double-wrapped in firstly white tissue paper and then, as an outer protective coat, in ‘jackets’ of foam mesh cylindrical sleeves which objects imbue the pears with a certain ‘otherness’ one might say.

Blogged, excitedly, at the time here, these jacketed pears have remained somewhere in mind as a vague possibility to be pursued creatively. Five years or so ago, during a weekend in London, a visit to a supermarket in Chinatown resulted in the discovery and purchase of a selection of such objects, a pair of which were explored in but a single watercolour sketch before, for whatever reason, I concentrated my attentions upon the undressed fruit whilst it remained fresh and firm in a subsequent series of sketches.

Remaining dormant again since, I recently felt the aesthetic pull of the foam jackets and searched the studio for what I imagined were the stash I’d kept for such an occasion, alas and frustratingly to discover that they were nowhere to be found when required to respond to the spark of inspiration. A trip to Liverpool last week – primarily to collect a couple of unsold paintings that had been exhibited during the course of the Liverpool Art Fair 2018 (which it was remiss of me to fail to blog, following on from a similar failure to mention other of my work’s almost-concurrent appearance in this year’s North Wales Open at Theatr Clwyd) – afforded the opportunity to locate and purchase a small selection of the jacketed pears and, after a couple of painting sessions, on Sunday and to resolve on Monday, the first visual evidence of a single example of this find is (re)presented below – the very first oil painting of an object of long-harboured desire. The familiar environment of white horizontal and vertical planes is evident, with the object suggested as existing within as subtly as possible.

'Pear in a Jacket'

oil on canvas/35 x 25cm/16-17 September 2018

[detail]

Monday, September 03, 2018

Summer Update

When not sat a desktop PC at work (which commitment coincides with the term-time of the typical UK academic year), I tend not to have any great desire to log in and use a computer, thus blogging about matters cultural and one’s creative practice (as distinct from Instagramming on a mobile device and, of course, actually pursuing one's creative practice) tends to take a back seat, as has been the case since late June.

However, the painting produced thus far over the ‘vacation’ has reached a point where it sort-of demands to be blogged in order to maintain that particular aspect of the process of creative practice and to maintain a currency of presence in cyberspace.

To this end, I now (re)present the seven examples of a body of paintings that have been developed over the course of the last couple of months, which take advantage of the seasonal availability of greater and brighter amounts of natural daylight in which to produce ‘white paintings’ (other project ideas and further developments of bodies of work in progress have accordingly been placed on the back burner until the autumn).

The objects represented are a selection of objects, vessels, moulded in air-drying clay from existing vessels, and display certain wonky characteristics such as finger and thumb marks and imperfect forms resulting from this process of hand-making which seem to coincide with the Japanese aesthetic of ‘wabi-sabi’, hence the titles of the works.

The vessels are composed in subtly changing configurations of relationships in the manner of most artists who work within the genre of still life and are painted in a manner that aims to communicate something of the nature of the fluctuations of natural light as it describes objects in space and the surfaces upon and against which they are arranged.