The Catch, by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, acrylic on board, 2014

I wrote a few weeks ago about this wonderful painting that I had acquired, The Catch, by my friend Clive Hicks-Jenkins. I went to stay with Clive and his partner Peter at their beautiful home in the Ystwyth valley in Wales recently and collected the painting from the Martin Tinney Gallery in Cardiff on the way back to London. I had a super weekend in Wales with Clive, Peter, Jack and other visitors; the weather was great, the food delicious and the company lovely.  We popped into Aberystwyth on the way back from a walk and here’s a pic of me and Jack in front of the glorious old university building on the seafront, a building that found it’s way into my painting.

I carried the painting carefully home on the train. Here it is at Cardiff Central waiting to board:

The Catch made it home safely to London and is now hanging in my bedroom where I can drift off to sleep wondering what or who that handsome fisherman is dreaming about behind his closed eyes…

What do you mean you’re tired, you’ve only thrown this thing a few hundred times – lightweight! 

This was one of those pieces that was put together out of offcuts of collage paper that I noticed lying on the floor and which suggested a shape to me. I added some leaves and ash seeds to make it into Yggdrasil, the huge tree that is central to Norse cosmology. I find the imagery attached to Norse or the Northern spiritual tradition fascinated and inspiring and I could spend most of my time making work sbout it. Sorry about the crappy photo quality, my camera is playing up so ii photographed if with the iPad.

After spending a few weeks experimenting, I’m starting work on the new pieces for the exhibition in February next week. It’s going to be more collage work, maybe larger in scale this time as we have the big gallery at The Horsebridge in Whistable. It’ll be a group show with two pals, Phil and Phill confusingly; we’ve got to come up with a name for the show – The Three Phils? Px3? Answers on a postcard please!

Rudbeckia, Groombridge, by Ruth Stage, Tempera on Panel, 2007

Still the late summer weather continues in London it seems. I though I’d post this image today, of a painting I bought about four years ago as it’s very evocative of this time of year for me; the pale, misty light, the plants and foliage ‘going over’, gardens going wild.

I bought it from a gallery in Whitstable, Kent (sadly no longer there) and it shows a scene from one of the great Kent Gardens at Groombridge. I love Ruth’s work, she’s made the tempera technique she uses all her own and her paintings are always unmistakably hers. Here are a few close up details which shed some light on how she built up the painting, from the gesso ground, to the pencil under drawing and finally the blobs and dashes of frothy  tempera – I love these detail photos almost as much as the painting itself:

Some glorious late summer weather during September, both in the UK and in Berlin, where I’ve been this weekend. This study of a grape vine in a greenhouse is oil on canvas, a medium I rarely use these days as turpentine gives me a terrible headache and I get impatient with the drying time. I usually use acrylics now although I do like the soft buttery feel of good oil paint.

We went for a bicycle ride out of town about an hour north of Berlin on Saturday on what may turn out to be the last day of summer here as it’s been  grey and rainy since. The sky was a perfect clear blue, the air warm and the lakes still warm enough to swim in. Here are a couple of photos of our day out:

As the weather turns more autumnal I’ll have to start getting stuck in to producing some new work for an exhibition early next year. I’ll be moving back to a more graphic approach and some more collage, but it’s been good to try some techniques over the last few weeks, it’s all grist to the mill and I’ve got a better idea of where I want to be going next!

I started making this painting yesterday and it quickly went very odd, ending up as a rather spooky gathering of dark figures, being called to a forbidding building for lord knows what.

I think the image came out so weird due to the afternoon I had at the weekend visiting a strange place just on the outskirts of Berlin, the old Deutsche Versuchsanstalt für Luftfahrt, built around 1936. I knew that a National Socialist era aeronautical research facility was probably not going to be cute and cuddly but it turned out to be even more wierd and spooky than I thought. I’d heard about it a while ago and finally got round to going to see it this week.

It was a Sunday afternoon and there was nobody about which made it more creepy. Getting off the S-Bahn at Adleshof I cycled south and soon found myself in a pristine, planned network of wide, empty streets and white, obsessively plain 1930s and 1940s buildings; it looked like the perfect setting for an old black and white sci-fi movie.

Then I came across these odd structures that had been built to test jet engines I think, and possibly the development of the V2 bomb during the  war. Although the forms of the structures was purely driven by their function it’s odd that they ended up looking so menacing:

The strange red pods on the ground emitted unnerving sci-fi noises when you went near them – corny, but it worked, it made you feel like you were in an episode of Dr. Who. The weirdness continued when I cycles back to the station a different way and I came across this tiny Ferris wheel in a scrap yard:

And then saw this face looming at me from the window of an old factory that looked like it had been taken over by artists:

At least the dragon Iooked friendly, which is more than the Versuchsanstalt place did. Here’s one more pic in black and white – cue the unsettling sci-fi noises:

Ok, studio might be pushing it, playing on the art table is more accurate, but it suffices for some room to play about on, which is what I’m doing at the moment ahead of an exhibition in February. I’ve given myself some time just to experiment without any pressure of it going anywhere. I’ve learnt from experience before that giving in too early to the anxiety around deciding what direction to go in, what theme to build an exhibition around, subject matter, style, media etc. can lead to problems later on.

So this month is pretty much about doing whatever I feel like, with lots of little things going on, many of which are not connected in any way, most of which might end up being cul-de-sacs.

I started yesterday by quickly laying down some painted textures on paper, using monoprinting, masking and a limited palette.

These were just quick splodges to get started but often I like how these initial textures look all by themselves and would happily frame them and have them on the wall as they are. Even the papers I used to mono print from look quite groovy and will definitely go into the drawer of collage papers as they have some great textures.

I then started working into the painted paper with coloured pencil to pull out some forms and ended up with the image at the top of this post. I like the Samuel Palmer/early Graham Sutherland quality of how it went. Not sure if it’s going anywhere but it feels good to play. Here’s another one which I left more abstract, leaving the shapes to be themselves a bit more: