Tag Archives: Gardens

The Green Fuse

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The Green Fuse, acrylic on paper, 14 x 22 cm, 2021

What a perfect phrase to express the life force that pours through the veins of all living things. The title of this post was conjured by Dylan Thomas, of course, in his poem The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower. His words were on my mind today as I cycled up to the studio with sparkling spring sunshine bouncing around the streets and glowing on the tips of plants and trees growing by the roadside.

I arrived in the studio at the start of a new week with a feeling that I wanted to work in colour again, and in particular, green. Still very small scale monoprints, but adding some spring and summer colour to the mix now.

Looking at the weather forecast for the next ten days or so, I can see that the green fuse is about to go off with a bang, big time. It’s very welcome. Whilst Germany is mulling over tightening Covid restrictions, i’m glad that the growing things around us are getting on with it regardless, they cheer me up!

Meconopsis

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Meconopsis (working title), Acrylic on panel, 60 x 70 cm, 2020

This painting started as a commission from a dear friend in London. My pal Mark had been to the Chelsea flower show and seen an amazing display of Meconopsis from a Scottish nursery. Mark himself is Scottish and he spoke to me about a painting including these flowers for his home in London.

Mark’s living room is a lovely, big light room, with a wide, south facing bay window and lots of wonderful art and furnishings. The walls are painting very dark so the painting needed to keep all that in mind. This is actually the third attempt at the piece, as the first versions floundered once I started painting in the blue of the poppies. I learnt quickly that the blue was difficult to match, and when I mentioned this to one or two gardener friends they told me that it was also difficult to include in a  planting scheme for the same reason!  But they were an essential part of the panting so I had to press on.

After the second attempt failed I started looking at Cedric Morris, an artist famous for painting flowers and, in particular, irises. I noticed he often used a warm background so I tried this and things started to work out. The warm background then suggested other plants to go with the poppies; pale yellow and black irises, lilies and trollius.

As the painting developed, some flowers grew, bloomed and then died as they got painted out, and others emerged and took centre stage. I learned a lot doing this painting and I’m keen to do more flower paintings like this, I find flowers endlessly fascinating, I could get lost in them!

 

 

Exhibition – Imagined Landscapes

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I’m very pleased to be included in the upcoming Imagined Landscapes exhibition at the Royal Cambrian Academy in Conwy this autumn. Curated by Clive Hick-Jenkins, the exhibition will include works by Clive, and also by Ian Whadcock, Kevin Paulsen, Garry Barker, Peter Lloyd, Abi Whitehouse Efnisein, Geoffrey Coupland, Orson Coupland, Desdemona McCannon, Jonny Hannah, Sharon Hannah, Barry Smith and Sarah Raphael-Balme. It’s a great pleasure to be showing work with such wonderful artists in such a lovely setting.

The details of the exhibition are as follows:

Imagined Landscapes

Saturday 21st October to Saturday 12th November

Royal Cambrian Academy

Crown Lane, Conwy, LL32 8AN

www.rcaconwy.org

The brief is a treat; while I do love painting from nature and sketching from observation I’m even more excited by inner landscapes, the genius loci of the terrain seen in the mind’s eye. The two are often intermingled, of course, with places i’ve been to and got to know seeping into my subconscious and then reappearing, transformed into some other place, so that the landscapes I create are layered in different associations and memories, just as the landscape I see when I travel or get out of town is a palimpsest of different stories, laid down over millennia.

I’m making some new work for the show, with possibly one or two older pieces in there as well.

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In the Gardens of Mr. & Mrs. Lyon, acrylic and collage, 31 x 76 cm, 2017

This collage stems from one of my current preoccupations, the story of Beauty and the Beast, reimagined as The Courtship of Mr Lyon by Angela Carter in her collection of short stories based on fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber. I’m making another piece of 3D work for the show of the Beast’s house as we first encounter it in the story, beautiful but sad and frozen, whereas this piece is set in a time after the end of the story, when the spell is broken, the Beast transforms and the ice melts. I’m sure I’m not the only one who is slightly disappointed when the Beast goes through his transformation at the end of the tale. By then i’ve fallen in love with him as the Beast, just as Belle has, and he’s always much more, well, ‘grrr’ than the rather insipid prince he usually turns into. Mind you there’s a nice moment in the recent Disney live action remake at the end when he turns into the Prince but has a beard. He says something like ‘I’ll shave it off tomorrow’ and Belle goes ‘ooh, no, I like it!’.

The collage has turned out rather more busy and whimsical than I’d set out to make but i’ll go with it; this is, after all, a picture about happy endings, when love conquers, winter turns to spring, everyone’s dancing and singing, cue the credits and swirling music….

I’ve made a lot of sketches, maquettes and photos as I explored this widescreen format and there is a lot of exploration from these sketches to do, it’ll keep me going for a while this train of thought…

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The Spirit of Wildwood

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I’ve got some pieces in The Spirit of Wildwood exhibition coming up at the wonderful Tanner & Lawson gallery in Chelsea next week, so if you’re in the area you’ll be very welcome at the private view on Thursday 1st. The exhibition is on until the 23rd December and includes some fabulous work by artists I admire enormously so i’m chuffed to bits to be in such talented company in this show.

The artists exhibition include: Susan Deakin – Kit Boyd – Kate Nicole – Peter Clayton  –  Paul P. Smith  –  Clive Hicks-Jenkins  –  Jim Sheehan  –  Bruer Tidman  –  Emily Mackey – Robin Lucas – Su Trembath  –  Richard Swallow

Here’s a selection of work that will be included in the exhibition:

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Forest Pool, by Phil Cooper, Acrylic on board, 55 x 70 cm

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Ferns, by Kate Nicole, Watercolour and stitch on paper, 75 x 50 cm

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Foliate Head III, by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, Acrylic on paper, 19 x 19 cm

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Green Man I, by Peter Clayton, Mixed media on panel

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Nalans Wind Up River, by Paul P. Smith, Oil on canvas, 100 x 150 cm

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Magnolia Grandiflora, by Emily Mackey, Gouache on paper, 80 x 60 cm

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Fading Flower, by Bruer Tidman, Acrylic on canvas, 183 x 183 cm

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Proof of Spirits by Jim Sheehan, Acrylic on board, 100 x 120 cm

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Winter Green Man, by Kit Boyd, Etching on paper, 36 x 30 cm

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Untitled, by Su Trembath, Mixed media on canvas, 100 x 160 cm

 

 

Autumn rain

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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

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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:

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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….

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 Sunday sketch 

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Wonderful end of summer sunshine this weekend, beautiful light and still warm enough to cycle round in a T-shirt; long may it continue! I did this acrylic sketch of some sweet peas growing in my friends’ garden this morning. I love these flowers and I love this garden, it’s going ever more frothy and shaggy at the moment and there’s so much going on I could paint noting else for a long time, the contrasting shapes and colours are magical.

Yesterday was another sunny warm day too and we had a wander round the trendy contemporary art district of Mitte in Berlin. We went into a hip art magazine shop, well actually these weren’t magazines, they were quarterly journals; more hi-brow and certainly more expensive. But I did find this little gem, Elsewhere. This issue, number 3 ,was right up my street, and had articles on the two places I live at the moment; Berlin, my main home, and the north Kent coast where I live when I’m working in the UK.

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And the writing is good, I particularly enjoyed a piece about Faversham creek, a few miles up the coast from my UK base in Whitstable. There’s a link to the journal’s website here. It’s been put together by Julia Stone and Paul Scraton, who’s also contributed the excellent Caught by the River website.

The ‘spirit of a place’ or the genius loci has always been a strong driving force in my artwork. Genius loci, that phrase captured by Paul Nash which seems to fit so much British art (incidentally, the Tate is doing a major exhibition about Paul Nash coming soon, which i’m very much looking forward to). But I like Elsewhere’s generous interpretation of the subject, including urban and suburban places, as well as imaginary places ‘that exist only in our heads – whether lost bur remembered, or imagined and invented.’ Definitely my cup of tea!