The Opposite of Tomato: September 2019

Thursday, September 19, 2019

More Nostalgia

'Seventies Project 3: Death Disco 7-inch Picture Sleeve'

oil on canvas/25 x 25cm/September 2019

More from the 1970s-themed project, with another object from the decade providing grist to the painting mill. On this occasion, the source material is, in effect, an item of packaging material, being the cardboard ‘picture sleeve’ housing an object within, a seven-inch vinyl 45rpm ‘single’ featuring Public Image Ltd’s ‘Death Disco’ as its A-side, coupled with ‘No Birds Do Sing’ on the reverse. Dating from 1979, this item thus signifies and encapsulates that latter part of the designated period when I’d reached my nascent post-punk music-obsessive stage that has endured and remained influential since, not least in the current circumstance.

Back in the day, as an aspiring artist/graphic designer and as something I’d started to do often, given the source material I was being attracted to, acquiring and becoming familiar with, this is undoubtedly a record cover I would have copied in drawing form, both the strange, compellingly gruesome image and the text, probably on a number of occasions, so the present painting as made constitutes an update of this process, this time presenting an object of a certain time-worn vintage that happens to feature an image and text upon its surface as a still life. Both the image, which research has unfortunately failed to establish an original artist to give credit to, and the music contained within, particularly ‘Death Disco’ itself, remain, forty years on, striking, harsh and uncompromising, suitably complementary in appearance and sound, and they provide a potent link back to their time.

[detail]

Wednesday, September 04, 2019

What We Did On Our Holidays

Today the opposite of tomato is more or less a wide slice of the action.

Beginning with a continuation of the ‘Spectral Stone Circles’ and featuring numbers 2 to 5 in that particular series, which, following the initial snowswept example, has taken a turn into misty environments that are best described as being not necessarily invented or generic but, rather, based on and adapted from observation of or sketches (sometimes historical) of actual locations, for example a local woodland. The circles themselves are composed of stone chippings approximately 8 - 10cm in height, collected on various perambulations, chosen for efficacy and arranged in circular form on the back lawn at home and photographed/sketched in situ, thus being both invented and real as, in effect, are the resulting paintings. Small in scale (all being 12” x 16”), the surfaces are all considerably more thinly painted than had become the norm with previous landscape/’woodscape’ subject matter although hopefully retain certain physical attributes that establish them as paintings.

'Spectral Stone Circle #2'

oil on canvas/16 x 12"/June 2019

'Spectral Stone Circle #3'

oil on canvas/16 x 12"/July 2019

'Spectral Stone Circle #4'

oil on canvas/16 x 12"/July 2019

[detail]

'Spectral Stone Circle #5'

oil on canvas/16 x 12"/July 2019

[detail]

The next painting continues with the ‘invented’ stone circle theme but, following a short break in the Shropshire countryside, departs from the ‘spectral’ and instead presents something that might be said to tend towards the picturesque, in keeping with the bucolic setting, which is in fact a view of the approximately 15 miles-distant Wrekin from an empty field in the Pulverbatch area, sketched on the spot which then provided suitable reference for the painting to proceed once back in the studio at home.

'Imaginary Stone Circle: a Field in Shropshire'

oil on canvas10016 x 75cm/August 2019

[detail]

As summer began to dwindle, I then had the notion to begin a nostalgic project based on subject matter familiar from a 1970s British childhood, intended to encompass anything that might be redolent of the period, beginning with a couple of objects that are further grist to the Uglowian mill in providing different materials and surfaces to represent in the individual forms of a carved wooden antelope and one of the Homepride ‘Fred’ flour-grader figures that have made numerous appearances in paintings already this year. These again are small-format works with the objects being represented at more-or-less life size.