Work on New Work

Milford Galleries have published a catalogue for the exhibition.  What a superb Gallery support they are.

Ok, so I ended up scrapping everything I had shown in the previous blog and made some ruthless decisions about the look of the show. I decided that all the work would be on a base of gold with a flat earthy dense mottled matt colour over it. At first I thought silver and gold and then I thought just gold, as it's so lovely and warm, and fitted the overall concept of 'Ardour ' better than steely silver.

Ardour noun
1. passion, feeling, fire, heat, spirit, intensity, warmth, devotion, fervour, vehemence, fierceness
2. enthusiasm, zeal, eagerness, earnestness, keenness, avidity

I work 'wet in wet', so once its dry the work is finished, I can no longer move things around. So I have several goes at inscribing gestures and work out where I want a work to go. Sometimes I rework a work 20 times and I photograph the versions along the way. It's a horrible moment in reflection when I look at the images and see that actually I have destroyed a  a work that had 'something' special. I cannot ever reproduce the gestures in the same way, and I ususually start pretty wild, refining and extracting as I go.

With this series they all had to have a different visual gestural unpinning idea: falling, throwing, growth, energy, 3d space, locks of hair, fire, weeds, supple-jack, ribbons, knotted trees, ikebana, grass and  agapanthus leaves.

I'm really excited about how interactive the gold makes the work. I varnished over the gold so its not a gaudy gold but more straw gold, very shiny and it picks up the light and moves it over the gestures when you look at the work. It blazes in a really dramatic way with changing light conditions in a domestic setting and goes quiet at night under electric lights.

The matt paints I use are so dense, rich and velvety. The downside is they are really sensitive to greasy fingers and scuffs so this painting has to be handled very carefully, and that's always a worry. Many artists I admire who use similar materials have work cordoned off as painting generally often longs to be touched.

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This work called 'Supernova' is a work for my collection from the series. I need to be with this work and have a domestic, daily conversation, engage with the variance of light and colour, a long term critique project that will determine what I do next.