Rod McRae
Paintings
Paintings
Following on from the last post, I'm starting to realise more of what I have to contend with here. That movie that I mentioned (the experience of the changing face of a painting) is, to all intents, in my memory. Unlike a real movie, there is no film, or digital file, recording it. I change the painting and can view the new version, but I am constantly trying to compare it to my memory of how it was before. But since the experience of viewing it is so subjective, and pray to any number of influences, this is pretty unreliable. At the end of a day's painting, I have made so many changes, that the movie, as I remember it, is just a massive blur.
This is partly why I have been trying to accurately record the changing face of each painting as it moves along using photography. Some of these paintings, particularly the dark and amorphous ones, I find very difficult to photograph accurately. The light in my studio changes dramatically during the day, and a photo taken in the morning looks quite different from that taken in the afternoon, even if I haven't painted anything new! I can capture changes in the gross forms, but not necessarily the subtleties of changing colour or mood.
Here's another painting I've been working on, with all the same issues involved:
As a contrast to the watercolour below, this oil painting is nevertheless playing with insubstantiality in a similar way.
Perhaps all my work is doing so at the moment.
Or, possibly more accurately, the work is exploring the interface between what is seen to be substantial, and what is seen to be insubstantial.
Though I can't quite imagine an actual interface between two such vague concepts. Rather, this is a continuum, from substantial to insubstantial (or vice-versa), and 'objects' can move from one to the other. At some point in this transition, something that is clearly not yet really an object, becomes one.
This happens all the time in painting. You start with a blurry blob, and end up with cup, or a rock, or a figure. Sometimes I find myself reversing this process, and the 'object' is blurred, and partly (or completely) obliterated. I am definitely attracted to the stages between these two, when ambiguity raises all sorts of possibilities, and imagination takes over.
The process of painting involves actively pursuing these transitions, and also experiencing the effects of viewing them. You view the results of the experiment, but also view it as a continuous stream, like a slow movie happening on whatever surface you are working on.
Heading into hot weather here, I thought I would attempt some watercolours - much easier to manage in the heat than oil paints or acrylics. How come watercolours are often referred to as a particularly English custom? You would have thought they would be more popular in the south of Europe, whereas we associate that area more with the oil paintings of Cezanne and Van Gough.
I've been doing quite a lot of work since those last three, but its mostly small works on boards. I'll put up some more photos soon, but I was quite happy with this one, which I completed today. I started it off with acrylics, which I've been playing around with recently, and finished it off with oil paint, and it all seemed quite unproblematic, for a change!
Here are some more of the small boards I've been experimenting with. I don't see them as finished works, more like starting points for further exploration.
This is more like it! working wet-into-wet, but on a very small scale, on masonite boards, is much quicker and more intuitive than drawing.
I'm trying to develop ways of drawing new images, in a quick way if possible.
Pencil on paper is an obvious way of doing this, but somehow its not quite as quick as I hoped.
The first painting of 2025 follows on perfectly from the end of 2024. Still dark, very dark and rather mysterious, even to me.