What the eye sees.
This morning I headed off to the National Museum in Cardiff https://museum.wales/cardiff/ to check out the paintings I never get tired of staring at, no matter how many times I’ve seen them, also the Artes Mundi Exhibition is on and a 220 million-year-old, unknown species of dinosaur footprint, found by four-year-old Lily on Bendricks Beach. It's an unassuming little beach, accessed down a track behind an industrial estate in Barry, that leads onto stone terraces. We've been down there hunting for dinosaur footprints several times, at first you search and search, think you're in the wrong spot and then you see the shape, three prongs flaring outwards indented in the rock. Once your eye has the hang of it you see loads of them, the feet of small dinosaurs pottering about in the mud, multi million years ago.
It makes me think of the numerous searches in my life gathering objects, a particular pink driftwood near Fox's glacier, NZ, red Devils toenails Stony Bay, Coromandel, a spiney shell, 90 mile Beach, Western Australia, a very pale blue hue of beach glass, Maraehako, East Cape. The list could go on and on but what fascinates me is that at first I cannot see them and then something tunes in and they are everywhere. Years later I can go back to the spot and I am instantly tuned in, that visual imprint.
Anyway as usual I digress, my museum plans were thwarted, even though it’s free I needed to book online in advance, of course I should’ve known that. These are the days when you can’t even so much as drink a coffee without scanning a QR code to order online before they bring it to your table in person. I’m booked in for next week so change of plan I’m back at the studio and it’s time to write my blog.
For the last two days I have been down in the clay room making a full size head from scratch. Following a similar process to the Écorché I made in March last year I constructed a head starting with the bone structure then building up flesh and features. The understanding of the deep set of the eyes, the protrusion of the muzzle in relation to the cheeks and the ears, oh the ears, they can drive you insane with their clockwise and anticlockwise interlocking spirals, always the same configuration but so many different ear shapes. It’s something about feeling the volume, seeing the three dimensionality when working in clay, that helps things stick in my brain and inform my painting process. Only two days of making, we get quieter and quieter as time runs out, last minute adjustments and 2 minutes after completion cut it up and throw the clay back into the bag. It was the construction not the end result that was important!
Back to painting… For those of you who work in oils I’m sure you will appreciate it is such an unpredictable medium. When painting in acrylic it dries quickly, you finish what you’re doing, come back the next day and it looks the same as when you left, which can be somewhat reassuring.
Oil paints are SO not like that, it’s not just that they take ages to dry, but interestingly I have come to realise that they are still moving as they dry. The oil seems to move between the layers changing the colours and their intensity as it sucks back towards the canvas. I have recently been dealing with this issue as I continue studying Rembrandt and Od Nerdrum, experimenting with multiple layers of paint application. I leave the studio and on return the first thing I do is check out the paintings I was working on and and see what’s happened whilst I was away. Sometimes I am pleasantly surprised by a level of cohesion between colours that were jarring when I left and sometimes disappointed by desaturation of vibrant hues.
This is difficult to demonstrate in snapshots of my paintings you need to see them in the flesh but on return to the studio, after a couple of days away, I was pleased with Amin who appeared to have melded but not with Dr Kagul who had developed a flat, desaturated surface.
These findings were followed by a somewhat timely experiment with painting on a canvas primed with Gamblin oil ground. In short this is an oil based primer that creates a barrier between the canvas and paint, as opposed to the usual water-based primer that allows oil to be sucked into it. At first, I was frustrated by the slick surface that allows the paint to slip around without adhering. Once I got used to this and applied a more dabbing as opposed to dragging motion with my brush I actually started to enjoy it and if things start to look muddy it’s easy to wipe back to the white oil ground surface. I came back the next day to find the vibrancy unchanged and a lustrous satin finish that would not have been the case had I've been working on a water-based ground. It will be interesting to see what happens with continuous layering.
Well that's it from me for now, I am heading up North with family to visit more family and do a tour of our roots, visiting the homes and workplaces of my ancestors of the last couple of hundred years or so. Then we are off on the motor bike up to Shetland and Orkneys to visit friends. Fun times back in September.