When a painting has gone to start a new life...
Well, the new owner of "Lewesdon Tree" picked up the painting this afternoon... and I'm gutted!
I guess that over 7 months I establish quite an intimate bond with my work, and we went through a real emotional roller coaster together.
The painting process is unpredictable and ever evolving, there are surprises and disappointments, discoveries and irritations, and eventually something remarkable and unique is created.
This was a challenging painting, which is exactly how I like my work to be - always pushing myself to greater accomplishment, to becoming a true master of the medium, and creating something that will last the test of time.
The intensity of thought that these paintings put me through is immense. Even when I've been miles from my studio it's been on my mind, playing with me. I guess this is because the first place I paint is in my mind - I'll have an idea and then paint it in my imagination first, before working it on the actual canvas.
So now I'll be directing all of that focus somewhere else... onto the next painting, the next project, the next exhibition. But it's made me remember that, at some point, every painting deserves the artists full attention. I also remember this when I've got several paintings on the go - which I have to do, as they take several months to make. You still have to give them each your undivided attention when you pick them up to continue to work on them. And every painting has a unique quality or character, and it's own demands. You can't simply jump from one to the next. You have to let yourself be absorbed by the mood of that particular painting. Because only once you feel it's 'spirit', only then can you know where it's leading you. It's like fine-tuning an instrument. Only it's a new instrument every time, and the tuning could be anywhere on the scale.
Every painting is the result of hundreds (or thousands) of choices - darker or lighter, intensify or subdue, proceed or remove, comfort or discomfort? And it's also a matter of degree - how bright, how moody, how loose or tight? And every choice is a moment of intensity, a moment of destiny. Sometimes you can wipe off the paint while it's still wet, and sometimes you can't because you find you've achieved something along the way that you don't want to sacrifice.
Well, bon voyage to "Lewesdon Tree". I hope that you're loved by generations to come. I put 7 months of my time into you. And that 7 months was a focus of the 12 years I've lived in Bridport, and that's on top of the still deeper connection that I can trace all the way back to my experience of growing up in the countryside of north Dorset.
And you know what? I love the Romance of this, I love the emotion and my passion for this place. I love that my painting relates to the entire history of landscape painting, from the Dutch 17th Century painters, to the European Romantics, artists of the Sublime and the Hudson River School. I love how it also relates to the French plein-air painters, and to Cezanne and the Impressionists. Paul Cezanne in particular, who like me, left the city to live in the country, and then returned to paint the same scenes over and over again.
Cezanne understood that a painting is always more than a depiction of something. It is also a thing in itself, an object that has it's own identity, and yet it can somehow capture the very experience of looking. I've never heard a critic talk any real sense about Cezanne, so I'll tell you this: stand in front of one of his paintings and just look at it. Stop trying to decipher it and just let it wash over you. Somehow it comes alive, you can feel the wind through the trees, you can feel the heat of the sun, and feel the textures of the rocks.
You have to realise that Cezanne set art off in a new direction, or you could say, in many directions. Van Gogh took it one way, Gauguin another, and Picasso still another. But there is no 'linear' track in art, which means that an artist today can draw inspiration from Cezanne and take painting on a whole new trajectory in the opposite direction to Modernism, Post-Modernism, etc.
This is what I'm doing. I'm taking Cezanne in another direction, and I'm taking Constable in another direction, and Casper Friedrich and Frederic Church. And I'm willing to do the work, to put in the hours, to do the research, to develop the skill, to look and learn and evolve.
Until next time.
