The Opposite of Tomato: Nature Encroaches

Friday, October 19, 2018

Nature Encroaches

Regular readers may recognise that I have long been enamoured of the work of Edmund de Waal and certain of my paintings have reflected the influence of this artist on my own process of thinking and making (some of the ‘white pears’ series make this explicit, for example).

Thus the most recent painting to be brought to a conclusion, (re)presented here, can be said to be haunted by a de Waalian spirit. Another still life, it yet incorporates a significant element from subject matter explored in what essentially constitutes my alternative painting practice, i.e. the world of objects and forms in spaces beyond the domestic realm, in the form of a collection of cylinders of silver birch, between about 12 – 18cm in height, sawn from a length of discarded trunk found in the woods close to home. Such ‘white’ cylindrical objects pay a certain homage to de Waal’s familiar white porcelain pots and are arranged within a shelving unit that in effect resembles the vitrines in which he exhibits such collections of handmade objects.

That’s the background, anyway. What follows is the habitual process of ‘active contemplation’, first through a pencil drawing and subsequently, with slight compositional modifications in the interest of achieving a more harmonious visual balance (the sketch made obvious what wasn’t working that hadn’t occurred to the eye), in oil paint on canvas.

Silver birch still life compositional sketch

graphite on paper/30 x 21cm/30th Sept. 2018

The usual rules apply, of the communication of the physical nature of the objects and ‘tactile’ space and the making of the painting though the materiality of the medium, paint as paint and the painting itself as a discrete object before it resolves itself into a representation of the observed world. Far from being white, of course, the cylinders of silver birch each display shared and their own particular characteristics in terms of subtle earthy colouration (greens, ochres, siennas, umbers), as distinct from the purity of de Waal’s white porcelain objects, and light and shadow describes and differentiates the form of the shelving unit on and in which they stand, but it is to be hoped something of a dialogue is at least suggested with the influential source. Furthermore, by introducing such barely-modified natural objects into the realm of the still life, a dialogue is opened-up between the two genres of painting that effectively constitute my practice and continuing areas of exploration, the woodland, albeit mediated, encroaches into the domestic environment, outside meets inside.