I’ve always been interested in exploring the ancient places scattered across our landscape; earthworks, hill forts, and especially standing stones and stone circles are mysterious and wonderful sites when you come across them. Julian Cope’s book The Modern Antiquarian and his website of the same name have been great companions over recent years and travelling around the countryside with an OS map trying to locate those tantalising symbols on the map  is one of life’s great pleasures for me. My latest round of snipping and collaging has been focussing on landscapes with standing stones, and here’s one I made this week inspirted by the largest standing stone in Cornwall, the St. Breock Downs Monolith:

These recent pieces have all been small, this one just 30 x 30 cms. as I’m mainly trying out different techniques before I work on anything larger and more ambitious. In this work I’ve used monoprinting, frottage, collage and some direct painting. At the moment I’m trying to work out which techniques and effects work best together and I’m also keeping things fairly monochrome until I get a bit more confident with what I’m doing.

I thought ‘behind the scenes’ was appropriate for this post about the collage I made earlier this week as these recent collages have felt like theatrical stages where I build sets and bring on characters, moving them around and take them on and off the stage to develop the scenes. At the moment, as I’m not fixing anything down, the scenes can change as often as I like and I keep the pieces in bags of loose paper cuttings so I can re-use elements in later work. At the moment, I’m just developing these ideas so I’m not fussed about glueing them down to produce ‘finished’ work, it’s all pretty much work in progress right now. Exploring and playing with collage – a new medium for me – has been great fun. Here’s a run through how the piece I made earlier this week developed:

Firstly, the seed of inspiration for the piece came from a walk through the Natur-Park Südgeläande just down the road from where we live here in Berlin. I saw this iron arch which had been made by artists for the park and was rather taken with it:

I knew I wanted a fairly empty landscape for this arch, to allow it be something different, so I painted the background on board in acrylics with atrament black and titanium white:

Here’s another version cropped down, which makes quite a nice ashen, Mordor-esque landscape on it’s own, I think:

Now, having set the stage, I started to make the characters, and had an enjoyable hour sloshing paint around onto different papers with rollers, sponges, spatulas, brushes and anything else that came to hand:

So I ended up with the following ‘cast’ for this piece, as well as the main red arch motif:

The really fun part then started as I could played about with the paper cut-outs on the background, and here are a few early versions as I moved the pieces around, changed the ‘characters’ to see what worked and what didn’t:

In the end though, after adjusting the background, I ended up stripping the piece back to go for the most simple arrangement which I think worked best, so here’s the finished piece again:

Portal 1

Here’s an image I’ve been working on today, it’s of a portal or gateway of some kind, set in a bleak landscape, using just two pigments, the red iron oxide and atrament black I’ve become fond of. The arch is on coloured paper, with a couple of other pieces of collage on a background painted on board:

Portal 1

Doorways, portals, gates – all classic devices to transport us into different worlds and magical universes. We find them in fiction, in storytelling and in spiritual traditions the world over and throughout history. From the shamanic paths down tunnels and up columns of smoke into the lower and upper spiritual planes, to Alice in Wonderland or Narnia, the idea of passing through barriers to unseen worlds is very seductive and I’m not at all immune to the charms of finding a mystic portal to another realm. These portals are also symbols of transition and change, and can represent the different points along a journey, such as the various stages of our lives.

I often photograph doorways I come across which catch my eye and just down the road here in Berlin is a wonderful rust covered iron arch which stands in the Natur-Park Südgelände next to Priesterweg S-Bahn station. The park used to be part of Tempelhofer railway marshalling yard until the ’50s when it closed. In 1996 it was designated as a Natur-Park and was brilliantly transformed into a managed ‘wild’ space. The park incorporates some of the original railway infrastructure and equipment including a superb old steam engine, now sitting grandly amongst the developing woodland. Some of the old ironwork from the railway was given to artists to transform into sculpture and the results now sit in a sculpture park in the Natur-Park along with restored railway buildings, a train turntable and a water tower. One of the sculptures is a beautiful rust covered iron arch, the inspiration for my artwork. The arch is a piece of material that has itself been transformed and which I’ve now transformed into a painting. I’ve been moving pieces of collage about on the main image above and I’ve photographed about a dozen or so versions of this piece today, but I like this simple version best, I think. I’ll post the other versions and some pictures of the process in a separate post tomorrow. If you’re ever in Berlin, the Südgelände park is worth a visit and makes a pleasant change from all those Cold War tourist sites.

I remember, a very long time ago, my Geography teacher said something like, ‘the UK, not much of a climate, but an awful lot of weather‘. Over recent weeks, of course, it’s certainly felt like we’ve been getting a lot of weather and I’m struggling to recall the last day it didn’t rain. Earlier this week I tried to fly from London Gatwick to Berlin; we got on the plane more or less on time, but four hours later we were still sitting on the tarmac waiting for the thunderstorms to clear, which they didn’t, so at ten o’clock we all went home. When I got back to the flat I found that a book I’d ordered had arrived – The Oxford Dictionary of Weather, by Storm Dunlop for goodness sake. After I’d stopped laughing over the irony of it all, or crying, I don’t remember which, I had a read through the book and fascinating stuff it all is. So, during the middle of July I’m painting dark, drizzly skies in my pictures, as that’s what I’m seeing outside, and every day the sky is full of layer upon layer of every type of cloud I can find in my new weather dictionary. I did get to Berlin on Thursday and the weather is just as pants over here, in fact this morning we had what the Met Office would probably call an ‘extreme rainfall event’ or some such jargon, but over here they more sensibly call ‘heavy rain’. There was much thunder and lightning, very, very frightening, so it was a morning to stay in and paint. Still collaging away and exploring the medium for landscapes. Here’s the rain appearing in the collage I made earlier:

Another one I made this afternoon, working into the collage a bit with paint such as on the sides of the trees and standing stones to give a bit of modelling to the shapes. It’s all going a bit 1940’s neo-romantic; not a bad thing but I’m going to work on these more over the next few days and see if I can take it in a different direction.

A couple of hours this morning working with scraps of paper and collaging, this time some rough and ready landscape scenes. Some of the paper was left over from previous work, some I made up this morning. I do love the way you can so quickly play around with different images and compositions with this technique, I don’t even paste anything down at the moment as it’s so much fun just taking things apart and re-assembling them. I was interested in using a limited palette here, too, and I particularly like the combination of the Red Iron Oxide, from Golden Acrylics, and the diluted Atrament Black, from Schmicke’s PRIMAcryl range which I’ve used on the branches of the cut out tree shape. The Atrament black has got a lot of green in it and goes beautifully with the red colour. It’s all pretty rainy looking, like the great British summer we’re having at the moment – thinking of the poor folks who’ve been flooded out.

I was over in Bridgend, South Wales at the weekend staying with old friends Alan and Gareth and their wonderful doggies Misty, Casey and Tudor. On Saturday, just along the coast on the outskirts of Swansea, my favourite artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins was giving a talk about his work and doing a maquette workshop which I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go to . The day had been organised by Artserve, an organisation  which supports creative arts in worship. The Methodist Collection of Modern Art includes a painting of Clive’s from 2010/11 titled Christ Writes in the Dust and Clive had been invited to give a talk about his work at an event hosted by the Methodist church in Sketty.

I’ve been in raptures over Clive’s work since I discovered him about a year ago so it was a tremendous thrill to go and meet the man himself, hear him talk about his work, share his stories, and to make some maquettes together. I’ve joined the many people all over the world who love his work which is not only supremely skilled in its conception and execution (I can’t think of anybody better, his drawing, use of colour and composition are gobsmacking) and powerful in its storytelling but  is also infused with a profound and deeply moving humanity. From small, graphic drawings and collages to large scale paintings, for me, Clive’s work acknowledges tradition, celebrates it, but is rooted in the here and now and I find his paintings make age old stories come alive and speak to me of what life is like in the present moment. I was a bit nervous walking into a group of people I’d never met before, but as I arrived, pretty much the first person I bumped into was Clive himself who instantly put me at ease and we soon got chatting as if we’d known each other for a while – which of course we had in some ways as I’ve been following Clive’s excellent Artlog for a few months now. He is as kind, generous of spirit, supportive of other artists and great company in real life as he is in the blogosphere. Clive brought along some of his beautiful maquettes for the workshop in the afternoon and they are stunning objects; I never thought I’d see a piece of my own work lying on a table next to Clive’s, but here’s the photographic evidence!

You can see Clive’s own post about the event at the Artlog here. The day at Sketty was such a pleasure for another reason as I was able to meet people who I had shared comments with online at the Artlog but who I had never met, such as Jacqui, a friend of Clive’s who had helped organised the day and make it such a success. Trying to make artworks of any kind can be a lonely and isolated business and Clive’s Artlog provides a great meeting place for people to see his work projects develop and to share their thoughts, ideas and experiences. What I’ve discovered through this online community has already opened up possibilities for my own work and I’m more engaged with and enthusiastic about my own practice than I have been for a long while. Here’s another picture of the snake I made last week, this time on its own, which is a direct result of cross pollination of ideas from the maquette exhibition on the Artlog earlier this year:

So hurrah for the digital age, I know how much it enriches my life and work and it’s put me in touch with some wonderful, inspiring people.

And finally, to finish off a great weekend, the weather cleared on Sunday and we went for a scamper on the dunes at Merthyr Mawr. it’s a beautiful, rather mysterious landscape, one which Tudor enjoys regularly the lucky chap.