Category Archives: night

Threshold

Posted on by
14

fullsizeoutput_21cb

Threshold, mixed media, 2020

I’ve been enjoying getting back into making some 3D work recently. Over the last couple of weeks i’ve made a couple of green man masks and yesterday I started playing about with some plaster that had been sitting on my shelf for ages. I’ve never used it before but i’d always liked the dry, crumbly texture of the material.

I started this piece by making a mould out of card and then adding the wet plaster. I had thought of trying a simple shape first to see what happened and the mould was very quick and easy to make. I wanted a rough, weathered texture so I didn’t have to worry about things being clean and precise!

As with a lot of my work, the process started with a small thumbnail in my sketchbook:

fullsizeoutput_21ce

The sketch included some sort of vines growing out of the stonework. As the piece developed, though, I decided to keep things very spare on this version (although i’ll probably make another version with the foliage at a later date). During the day I got a message with some very sad news about an old school friend and so my mood shifted during the course of the afternoon and this fed into how the work developed. In the end, it became rather melancholy and elegiac.

I painted the plaster plain white, and placed it in an empty landscape, with a painted sky backdrop somewhere between twilight and night. I was very happy with how the plaster took the texture of the mould and how easy it was to then work into it more, once out of the mould.  It’s a very fragile medium but it’s also cheap, quick drying and easy to work with, which suits me 🙂

Here’s a detail of the piece again, and another image with different lighting:

fullsizeoutput_21cffullsizeoutput_21c9

 

Forest music

Posted on by
14

ORG__DSC7957

‘Out of the Mid-wood’s Twilight’, acrylic and paper collage on panel, 30cm, 2018

A whole series of forest inspired programmes and features are being broadcast on BBC Radio 3 this week; right up my street, especially as I’ve been working on a new stage adaptation of Hansel and Gretel recently where the forest looms large.  The programmes have been great, full of beautiful music and fascinating stories; there’s a link to the Radio 3 website here. This series of programmes really is a treat and I think you can listen to them on the BBC Radio iPlayer for a few more weeks yet.

Wonderful new music has been composed for Hansel and Gretel by Matthew Kaner. Matthew says of the project:

‘Simon Armitage’s poetry is an inspiration to work with. It’s a helter-skelter journey from ghostly foreboding horizons to a pleasure park of sweet feasts. It’s pushed my music into new territories.’

I heard some of the music in rehearsals a few weeks ago and it’s spine-tinglingly good. There are only a very few tickets left for the premier in Cheltenham, but tickets are now on sale for the following venues up until Oxford, with tickets for the the later shows to go on sales shortly; follow the links below for information and tickets:

I’ll be going to the Cheltenham, London and Canterbury shows – see you there if you’re going!

——–

I’ve been cutting and glueing paper collages this morning, starting to put some ideas down that have been evolving while I’ve been working on Hansel and Gretel. Collage has been a real friend to me in the last couple of years. While I’ve been juggling a busy ‘day-job’ to make a living, time in the studio has sometimes been very limited and with collage you can quickly get something down, move things around, try out compositions and generally have a play about. The last month has been hectic as I’m coming up to finishing a work contract with a local authority. It’s been a dash to get as much as possible finished and ready to hand over. So, with the first bit of time to do something in a while this weekend, it’s out with the scissors and glue. The collage above is on a circular panel which I thought i’d try out – not sure, lol – compositionally, it’s tricky!

With the scraps I made a little illustration of the witch’s cottage I designed for Hansel and Gretel, a model of which will be appearing on stage:

fullsizeoutput_1be1.jpeg

My collage, though, is based more on sketches of the model by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, who has been working as visual director for the stage production. You can see his beautiful drawings and other terrific Hansel and Gretel images at his Instagram site here.

And finally, here’s my model of the cottage, and a Lebkuchen version I made for an animation sequence too. I’m all for experimenting with new media and now I can add  fake iced gingerbread to my toolkit 🙂

fullsizeoutput_1994

fullsizeoutput_1956

 

Autumn rain

Posted on by
12

fullsizeoutput_114c

In a Whitstable Garden 2 – November Storm, acrylic on panel, 40 x 20cms, 2016

Well, after going on about how wonderfully sunny autumn has been in my last post i’ve just spend a sleepless night listening to the first proper autumn storm sweeping across the south east this year; that’ll teach me!

Funnily enough, while I was painting yesterday I happened to be listening to a ‘rain’ mixtape that Radio 3 had put together. The storm hadn’t arrived then but the gentle pattering of the rain on the mixtape was nothing compared to the hammering against my window during the night –  nice music though and the perfect soundtrack for the weekend.

Astronomically it should have been a dramatic week too, with the so-called ‘supermoon’ arriving on Monday. But, predictably, after several days of lovely clear skies, an impenetrable leaden blanket of cloud arrived right on cue to reduce the phenomenon to the proverbial damp squib. The leaden blanket duly evaporated just after the supermoon had declined, so that was that <sigh>. In my painting, though, the supermoon gets a patch of clear sky before the first gusts of wind herald the arrival of the storm. Looking out of my window as I write this I can see the Acacia tree outside has lost all it’s leaves overnight and is now looking proper wintry…

Autumn sunshine

Posted on by
11

 

fullsizeoutput_112f

In a Whitstable Garden 1 – November Sunshine, acrylic on panel, 30 x 40cms, 2016 

Spring and summer are definitely my favourite times of the year. In autumn I can go a bit melancholy and as for winter, well, I can do without it, or I could cope with it better if it was just a week of cold clear frostyness and then things went back to spring again. But this year autumn has been really lovely; mild and bright right through October and now the leaf colour is absolutely marvellous.

My friends up the road here in Whitstable have a wonderful garden, i’ve posted about it before, and right now it’s gone wild and shaggy and is still full of glorious autumn colour. The mild Kent climate means there is a wide variety of plants that flourish in gardens here and my friends’ garden is lush and almost tropical in the summer. Even now, in mid-November, it’s still full of wonderful things; seed heads and stems start to appear and make fantastic subjects for painting. I’ve been particularly taken with the Rudbekia seed heads and the tangle of climbers such as  Clematis and Spanish Flag. Here are a few details of this weeks’ painting – I like the details very much as they’re a bit looser and more energetic:

fullsizeoutput_1126fullsizeoutput_112afullsizeoutput_1125fullsizeoutput_1127

I’m enjoying the painting at the moment and with the wonderful autumn colour and shapes I might keep going for a bit with images of this garden, until winter really starts to take its toll and the whole thing collapses back into the soil until next year….

: