Plans and Paint update
As per usual I have left it too long between blogs to maintain momentum, my excuse this time is that I am loving my studio. It’s the biggest I have ever had, approximately 4m x 9m, I can fill walls with previous work, current experiments and view from a distance. I have room for three seat options, my saddle seat on wheels to glide around when painting and over standing, a basic wooden folding chair for quick sit viewing and the recent arrival of my comfortable wicker chair with cushion for longer, comfortable contemplation. In addition my more recently activity, lying flat on the concrete floor to cool down.
I have made the most incredible paint holding pegboard, with bull dog cli[p and dowel, an idea taken from Jac and Michael Harding. If any of you are oil painters out there I can quite honestly say this has revolutionised my painting. It has saved me hours searching for paint in a shoe box, the tubes don't get stuck together and damaged and I don't forget about a colour lost in the recesses of the boxes. Apparently this is the way you should store your paint it keeps the pigment down at the neck allowing the lighter oil to rise so you don’t open the tube to find an oily flurry with no pigment and equally get to the end of the tube to find it so stiff and unworkable due to lack of oil.
I’m exploring multiple themes, not ready to narrow down the investigation, although I must admit my lack of ability to hone in, is itself, a lifelong theme. I even struggle with cropping a photograph for fear of losing something I want to keep in the corners. Arguably this is not a problem but as an artist if you don’t narrow down your investigation, you’re in fear of diluting the impact, there is nothing worse than a cluttered exhibition lacking focus, but for now I have time.
As I said in my last blog, my broad interest lies in the cultural variations on the ‘everyday’ and whilst day-dreaming a plan came to me…. how would it be to be the foreigner exhibiting in the country I am painting about, as opposed to taking my ideas home to exhibit? Our everyday life at home can be mundane, we barely see its cultural idiosyncrasies whilst an outsider sees with fresh eyes, there may be something about the outsider’s perception that could interest a local. Just an idea but I’m keen to test it out and follow a similar process in different countries. On our last visit to Thailand, I had a serendipitous meeting with a gallery owner in Chanthaburi, a South-Western Thai town close to the border of Cambodia, I reconnected, proposed the idea and they are keen to host my exhibition, step one complete! The plan is travel to New Zealand via Thailand this November, paint and plan in Chanthaburi for 3 weeks en route and exhibit there on the way back to the UK in April 2023.
The logistics are not straightforward, NZ customs do not allow entry of wood and may decide to destroy canvas paintings with wooden supports so I need finish these paintings before November, leave them in Thailand and continue to NZ with Artfex aluminium canvas supports. Travelling with oil paint products is unpredictable, many airlines consider them to be flammable and getting them passed customs is hit and miss. This raises the biggest question do I travel with my most beloved and extortionate (£90 for a 40ml tube) genuine Chinese red vermillion and lapis lazuli with the risk they may be confiscated, I am hatching a plan to disguise them as lipstick and eyeshadow.
Enough about my plans what have I been up to in the studio? Here are a few snippets of my current work:
The condiment assemblage
Like the broom in my last blog, the condiment assemblage is a common thread throughout Thailand. With the exclusion of Westernised restaurants, you will find it in various forms on the tables around a street food cart into the markets and permanent restaurants. Whilst eating out in the UK or New Zealand you would be lucky to find salt and pepper on your table, in Thailand you will find a full assembly consisting of sweet vinegar, fresh chilies in vinegar, chilli paste/sauce, chilli oil, sugar, fish sauce, plastic jug of water, a dispenser of single ply tissues and often some chopsticks. The containers can be cheap bright plastics or upmarket glass and chrome and the ingredients can vary based on region and grandma’s special chilli paste but always the full orchestra. The Thai way is that you receive your food in fairly neutral form and adjust the sweet, salty, sourness to create your perfect flavour, it’s like being at Hensol Gin distillery in Wales creating your perfect gin or Grasse perfume factory in France to create the perfect scent. It is a delicate and complex process, people often share their favourite flavour combinations that have led to me experimenting and becoming more of a chilli vinegar with a touch of sugar person than my previous chilli oil self. This painting is nearly finished.
The Thai town house/shop
If you haven’t been you may think Thailand is full of wooden houses on stilts with pointed roofs but they are quite honestly few and far between in comparison to, Thailand's love of concrete structures. At one end of the scale concrete is used with incredible skill for temple sculptures and at the other end unsafe functional structures that crack and sink sideways into the river without a building regulation in site. This is your typical townhouse small footprint rising up a minimum of 3 stories. A shop, home, storage, everything structure where the shop converts into family lounge TV on at night and by day the older generation sit shop front watching the world go by.
Some other themes in progress....
I am about to move into an investigation concerning ‘colour’. We think we are 'funky' in the West when we clash together leopard print, paisleys and pussy willow with pinks, oranges and green in an Asian inspired way but to be quite frank it is always carefully contrived with a sensitive balance between the duck egg blue, the pinks with some golds and browns intermixed from my experience in Asia these scenes are reserved for boutique hotels and tourist haunts the average Thai and certainly Vietnamese decor has a completely different set of aesthetic rules that go way beyond the Wests idea of aesthetically pleasing.
I don't know where this is going yet but I'm just putting colour on canvas whilst thinking about Thai colour and black mould.
A slight aside, my new favourite book and I'm only 50 pages in! Spike Bucklow’s ‘The alchemy of Paint’, a must read if you are interested in the origin of pigments. This fascinating book is talking to me about the rare Tyrian purple made from the glands of the flesh eating, Mediterranean, Murex Snail; the ancient birth right of the Gloucestershire Freeminers mining earth pigments in the Forest of Deans Clearwell caves and how the Mappa Mundi can lead you on a spiritual path Eastwards to the doorstep of paradise in search of lapis lazuli, the most beautiful blue that has been used in art for thousands of years.
That's it for now my friends back to painting, I'll probably see you in another two months!