I’m starting a new painting this week, based on the ruined monastery at Reculver on the North Kent coast. It’s just a few miles east from Whistable where I used to live but it couldn’t feel further from that thriving and jolly little seaside town. Despite the imposing ruined towers of the old church Reculver is a bleak and melancholy spot, even in summer. The village and the church were abandoned due to erosion by the sea and what’s left is now shored up by slabs of unlovely concrete to try and preserve the remains. It has bags of atmosphere, though, and the lonely towers, silhouetted against the sea and the sky, make an arresting sight. In 1776 Thomas Philpott described it as ‘full of solutiude, languishing into decay’, which sums it up nicely.

As I’ve started using maquettes to kick off my creative process recently I made a model of the main part of the ruins yesterday. I’ve used a different technique to the tower and cottage models I made recently; these were made of card and overlaid with plaster bandages which produced a very rough and rustic surface. This worked fine for the ancient tumbledown look I wanted for those fairytale buildings, but with Reculver I painted stiff paper and then cut and assembled them into the shapes I wanted, resulting in a smoother finish. The painted paper suited the subject better as I wanted to focus on the geometry of the ruins, which was what gave them such presence, rather than their crumbling surfaces.

Here are a couple more pics of the maquette:

And some photographs giving the place a more gothic look, to start to explore a mood for the painting:

It was my friend the artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins who first suggested I try these techniques as a way of unlocking new creative approaches in my work. Another method Clive has used to brilliant effect is making shapes from wooden building blocks to establish the main volumes of a structure and to experiment with composition. Walking round a flea market at the weekend I spotted a big tub of wooden blocks for a few Euros so I snapped it up and have been playing with them this morning. They’re great because they allow you to experiment with space, volumes and composition without getting bogged down with any detail:

These are my first thumbnails from when I was thinking about this subject yesterday:

Now with the maquette, the blocks and the photos, I can try out some compositions and refine where I want to go with this painting. Today, I’ll prepare a 40 x 40 cm board and start to draw our some trial arrangements – onward!

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks making 3D maquettes of structures out of card, plaster and paint as a way of trying different routes into creativity and image making. Today I starting using the models, and the photographs I made of the models, as starting points for drawing and painting. I’ve not been painting much for the last couple of years and I feel a bit timid with it, so the photographs and strong shapes of the models I hope will prompt me to focus on composition and space in a more direct way.

I had this little 20 x 20 wooden panel in my workspace which has been hanging around for some time so I made a start with some painting with acrylics. It was hard going at first, it so easily tends to veer off into being too fussy and ‘soft’, and a couple of attempts got painted over before I started to get somewhere and retain a bit of freshness at least. I always work very small so I might try something much bigger too as a way of breaking out of being too precious. The maquettes and the photos are great tools though, it’s changed the way I think about making work.

Here are a couple of pics of the basic maquettes before painting , I like they way they look in just the raw plaster covering:

Probably the last photos of this particular set of maquettes for the moment; I’m going to try and make some drawings and paintings of them next week. At the same time I’m going to try some different techniques and different looks for some more models and see what works best. I’m also going to start experimenting a bit with video; so Spooky Village – The Movie, coming soon! It’s a whole new world of shopping opportunities at the art shop 🙂

Just a few more photos taken in a different light early this morning. Right, must put them away now and get on…. 

  
Ok, so village may be pushing it as there are only three buildings and a bridge at the moment, it’s probably a hamlet, but it has definitely becoming a place. I think I’ll make some trees soon to put in there, and I need a bigger backdrop. I’d also like to make a bit of a hill to place it on which will create some more interesting dynamics with the photos. At the moment I’m quite enjoying giving it the ’70s look with the faded colour cast I add to the images – I grew up in the ’70s so I’m of a generation steeped in Oliver Postgate; I think I’m channeling Bagpus a bit with the colour palette in some of these photos.

Here are a few images including a tower I made today, with a few different treatments to the photos:

Ooops, don’t you hate it when that happens and you publish the post by mistake before you’re finished! Anyway, here are a few more pics of the addition to the little village – I’m soon going to have to think of a name for it!

I tried a couple of different effects when photographing this time. As well as the ‘noir’ filter I’ve gone for in previous posts I’ve also left some colour in some images and these have the look of a rather faded recording of a seventies animation to my mind, I just can’t put my finger on what it reminds me of:

I realised soon after starting to experiment with model making recently that it was a very messy endeavour, but that it was also lots of fun, or maybe the messiness was part of the fun! Anyway, I’ve now also realised that it takes up a heck of a lot of space. I’ve been making paintings and collages for several years now in a small corner of a room, but this new approach is gobbling up surfaces as fast as I can put up more shelves to store things on. Luckily we’ve got a large, dry cellar here in Berlin, and if I carry on making these models I’m going to need it. Yesterday I made up a little cottage, a bit spooky, perhaps a witches cottage. A place you wouldn’t want to have to knock on the door of on a dark and stormy night if you were lost and wanted to ask for directions.

With these new little maquettes i’m trying out different methods of construction and different materials for surfaces and seeing what photographs best. I’ll be collaborating on a project with my friend the artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins in the near future which will involve making a model to be used in filming so I’m experimenting to get the look I want. This little cottage was made with card, then covered with plaster bandages and finally a layer of thin paper. It does give a very lumpy, rustic effect but on this scale I think I might try something less textured such as the gummed brown paper strips I used for the gatehouse which I think works better. Or maybe a combination of the two, we’ll see. Luckily I’m married to a photographer so I’ll be able to call in a favour and see how the models look when photographed using professional lights and camera, although so far I like the grittiness of these makeshift pics with the iPad camera and a handheld torch for lighting!

In recent and previous posts I’ve written about my enthusiasm for expressionist film and architecture and about how they have influenced my work. There are many qualities about the style that do it for me, one of which is how it can be just so weird. I visited an expressionist church in Berlin last week called the Kreuzkirche, on Hohenzollerndamm, designed by the architects Ernst and Günter Paulus, and completed in 1929. It looks like something from a Flash Gorden movie, it’s just so weird, and I absolutely love it. The church wasn’t open when I visited, but there’s a link to a page here where you can see a few pics of the extraordinary interior. Expressionist architecture took various forms in the 1920s and ’30s, but I particularly like this kind of brick expressionism with its spikes shapes and slightly hysterical gothic overtones. Here are a few more photos: The weather has been so wonderful this last week in Berlin I’ve not got much work done – you have to make the most of it as the winters are long and cold – but I’m starting to take over the flat with my model making and a strange expressionist village is growing out from my desk. I’ll post more pics when I photograph them during the week. Here’s a small sketch in acrylic of the bridge and gatehouse I made last week. I’ve given it the 1920s expressionist  movie treatment, but this is just to get into the feel of it and I’ll be getting more meaty with the paint over the coming weeks:  I do love exploring this idiom, but if I start moving in an exaggerating, jerky way and pulling crazed faces all the time I know it’ll have gone too far. For now, though, I can’t get enough!

I’m not sure exactly what the difference is, can anybody enlighten me? Anyhoo, making small scale 3-D studies is what I seem to be doing this week and this much I know so far; making models (or maquettes) is lots of fun and it’s messy :-).

Here’s a model of a bridge I worked on today, using card as a base, and then building up and binding together using plaster bandages and moulding paste:

It’s based on the bridge in an iconic scene in the film The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, a wildly expressionist construction, all skewed angles and forced perspectives, more like a helter skelter than a bridge you could actually walk along.

I’m going to use the model for a painting , but base the painting on photographs of the model rather than drawing from life, from the model itself. After painting the bridge this afternoon, I took some photographs and added some serious contrast to get the 1920s silent film look:

At the moment it feels like exploring these new ways of working is going to change the way I make images and the kind of images I make, so quite an interesting period!

Das Torhaus (The Gatehouse), acrylic on board, 20 x 30 cms, 2015  

Since I returned home to Berlin last week I’ve been exploring a new way of working which involves building a model or maquette, photographing it and then painting from the photograph. For the best part of 3 years I’ve been working mainly with collage but I was feeling like I’d stopped making progress with this approach and the new way of working is doing exactly what I’d hoped in that it is opening doors out of the room I felt stuck in. It may be that, when I go back to collage after doing something different, I’ll enjoy it again and get something more out of it.

So, the process started with sketching thumbnails like this:

Which I then used as a guide to building a model out of cardboard, gummed paper and acrylic paint. I didn’t draw detailed plans of the model as I wanted it to be very raw looking:

The model making is entirely new to me and I’ve got a long way to go learning the techniques and how to use different materials. For now, though, this very rough way of constructing a shape works fine as I want a very rough finish-

For this image, I wanted a strong style reminiscent of the classic 1920s German expressionist films such as The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, so I then employed a simple ‘noir’ filter using the Photogene app on my iPad to get the dramatic effect and using an old painting as a backdrop:

The final stage was making a painting from the photographs. This was the bit I was rather apprehensive about as I haven’t really done much painting recently- I went very small, just A4 size, in relation to my confidence, but things went ok and i’ll work a bit bigger next time. The result is rather too neo-romantic for what I was trying to get to: I want to retain a bit more of the drama of the expressionist film feel so I’ll work on that in the coming images – better get some more black paint in then!