Blog 2023

A small work on paper I started a while ago, using acrylics, but I started working over it more today adding some ink for the darker areas:

I’m intending to do some more to it using oils, so I sealed the paper with a layer of pure acrylic first.

Looking closely at this painting again, which was last mentioned here back on Jun 27, I feel it needs a bit of pruning.

Work for the next few days…

And I’m starting to work over the small acrylic painting below with oils, which I find a lot easier than acrylics, to be honest.

The larger painting above is about five or six times bigger, though the photo suggests otherwise.

I’m in the middle of painting these small, dark paintings. It continues the trend I am following, which is about creating more ambiguous spaces, lines and forms.

The second one is unusual for me because I’m using acrylics rather than oils. I still find this difficult, but I’m making progress. I don’t think its particularly apparent that the two are in different media.

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And, the painting I was working on before (see ’Breaking the forms’ post below) is getting a bit more contrast in it.

I felt rather hemmed in by the forms in this painting (last on this blog on 01 July this year) - as it was then :

so I went back to it and broke up the forms by blurring the lines and filling in some of the multiple spaces. I’m interested in the way its progressing now, though it feels like its got quite a way to go yet. This is how it looks today:

Its actually reminding me of this recent one too, in the indefiniteness of the forms in the upper half (and I feel pretty happy about this one) :

Something else I did by painting over a work that previously didn’t work (just a week or so ago):

Those older drawings have stimulated me into doing some more drawing.

Here are three early efforts (latest at top):

I have been decluttering my studio, and started sorting a pile of old drawings.

Most of them weren’t worth keeping, so they have been recycled. But there are some that struck me as worth another look, particularly a group of them from roughly 1985-86. These are the ones I found most interesting:

I haven’t finished that last one yet, but I decided to start on something else, and in this case, its not over an old painting, but a fresh start. However, I did put a nice thin coat of acrylic on the canvas to push the white surface back to start with. I’ve been working on this for a week or so now. Its progressing slowly, but surely.

I’m doing some more painting over old work. This is good for several reasons.

It cuts down my collection of old work, which is too large to manage, and makes me consider whether a painting really needs to continue to exist.

And it saves me from all the laborious process of creating stretchers, stretching the canvas, sizing, priming and so on.

This time it is a painting from 2010, called “Tribal”. Here are the stages it went through today…

Tribal (2010)

Once I had primed over the old painting, I started a new drawing on it.

But I wasn’t too happy with that, so I pushed the whole lot back with a light coat of primer.

Then I got rid of all the white ’space’ to bring it all back into one plane.

Various coats of thin acrylic softened all the forms.

Finally, I could start drawing something different (less landscape, which I didn’t want)

Enough for one day!

After a few days work, its starting to turn into something a bit different, but this is mainly in the atmospherics and the surface working. The basic structure is still there.

I’ve turned the painting back the way it was originally, and I’ve been working on it for a couple of days using a new medium with my oil paint, which is proving to be quite a change in the way I work.

Specifically, I’m now using an artificial oil/gel medium called Neo Megilp (made by Gamblin), which is its real name, despite sounding like something out of Star Wars. It has replaced, for now, the Windsor and Newton Liquin medium that I’ve used for about thirty five years. It dries a bit slower, and its a bit thicker to start with, but its mainly the slower drying that is affecting the way I work.

Using liquin, every day I start painting, I am painting over the previous day’s work, because liquin always dries overnight. With Neo Megilp, the paint is still wet the next day, so I’m painting into the previous day’s work, not over it. Its quite a different feeling, and produces quite a different effect. This type of painting (often referred to as painting “wet into wet”) is considered by some people (notably Bruce Pollard who used to run Pinacotheca Gallery where I showed my work for many years) to be critical to the success of any painting project. I’ve never really accepted this view, but I’m prepared to be surprised, and already I’m quite excited about what this might mean for the way that I paint. Of course, you are often painting “wet into wet” during a painting session anyhow, so there isn’t a totally clear distinction. Its exactly this sort of complexity of process that makes painting an infinitely fascinating activity.

This is the first of three new works I’m painting on canvas (and the photo above is where I’ve got to today). I’m starting with old works which were never entirely satisfying to me. Its always interesting working over old work - what to keep, and what to totally obliterate? In the end a lot of things happen which weren’t planned, but which emerge as part of the process of engaging with an existing image. This one was originally called “Danger” and was in a show I had at Place Gallery in Melbourne in 2009 (also shown at Watters Gallery in 2008):

It was rather an unusual work for me, being loosely finished and largely expressionist in style, though this was something that I was experimenting with at the time. It will be interesting to see how it ends up.

Note that I have turned the painting upside down, which is a ploy I quite often use to upset the dominance of existing forms.

I have decided not to pursue a new kind of blog, which I was trying out using “Ikiwiki”. So my blog all stays here, on this page, for now.

I started out with pen and ink, then pencil and finally added some dabbled wash with highly thinned ink and brush. At least I’m keeping the structure open, which was my intention. Even now, I find the digitised version (from a photo in this case) disappointing somehow.

But that’s what REAL drawing is about, isn’t it? whatever it is that digitisation can’t quite capture…

Following up my blue painting, with its dissolving structure, I thought I might try doing some black and white images, using ink, and try and reproduce the fluctuating space of the painting. I think I have more work to do on this!

I switched back to working on this painting, which is quite different to the one in the post below.

Which could be difficult, but I’m actually enjoying the change.

To make it a bit easier to see the development from the end of last year, here is the previous image of it:

I’m going to make a big effort to do more posts, and the beginning of 2023 seems a good place to start.

Talking of posts, I’ve been doing some fencing around the garden, and these fence palings are giving me some ideas that could lead to some sculptural changes in my painting work (more on this soon).

I have also been experimenting with alternative blogging possibilities, specifically using “Ikiwiki”, which is an open-source blogging system, on my own Debian Freedombox server. It works well in some ways, and less so in others. I’ll continue putting posts in this website for the moment, and let you know here if I decide to transfer to an alternative system.

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