Painting Methods

 My work, over recent years, has evolved from an interest in the play of light, shade and fugitive atmospheric effects on architectonic forms. These forms, which I regularly use, are employed as a foundation onto which the “atmospheric envelope” is applied. Some works between 2000 and 2004 have more “recognisable” images from the natural world added to and combined with the architectural and geometric images which I have used for many years; resulting at times in somewhat more “realistic” pictures. The cycles of paintings after 2002 show a reduction in architectural complexity and use of geometric elements, with  colour becoming the dominant feature. The result of this being more “impressionistic”  works, with their simpler formal compositional elements  giving the atmosphere in the works more complexity and variety.   

The working method I use suggests a synthetic and scientific use of neo-impressionist colour. This is only occasionally true as I generally do not divide colours in the normal divisionist manner. I always use a freer and less formal approach to obtain the finished effect which I desire. Many layers of innumerable tiny dots of pigment are systematically juxtaposed and blended until the all-pervasive atmosphere governing the work is achieved. This may be suggestive of early morning mist or fog, the afternoon’s heat, the calm of evening or the darkness of night.

Colour has  always been my “raison d’etre” and always associated with differing  human  emotions.  It  is  this consolidation  which has to work successfully before I can  consider a work to  be “finished”.  My normal procedure is to construct pictures based on a matrix of similar or related hues and I only occasionally use strongly contrasting colours and tones. Over the years blue-green relationships have appeared most commonly in  my  works  and  this is with the set intention of inducing a sense of undisturbed peace.

Although the paintings are loosely based on neo-impressionist doctrines and practices they are often infused with technical devices which can be consistently found in the manner of the “romantic” impressionists. Where stark contrasts or very strong colours occur, transition colours are applied to soften the contrast or reduce the implied tension. The successful combination of “concrete” forms, dissolved contours, emotive colours and fleeting atmospheric effects are the primary qualities which I constantly seek

From nature I take differing ethereal reactions and physical states such as, mist and fog, sunshine and shadow, rain or snow and exploit their special qualities to create certain fugitive impressions. I do not “copy” nature, but “distil” it from actual or remembered images and sensations. The result is that I can orchestrate it’s consequences in order to present varying pictorial effects and experiences. This is especially the case with the earlier cycles of paintings: “Les Iles D'or” (2001), “Les Iles Immortelles” (2002-4) and “Barbizon” (2003-4).

 Over the last decade new horizons have opened up providing me with a new found delight in the beauty of nature and the changing seasons. Every moment and every emotion now appear more polarised for me and thus many are crystallized into very concrete images and others into pictures of a more fragile and transparent nature. These new paintings are the most personal and introspective I have produced since my quasi-neo impressionist works of the late 1960’s. It is as if the process of “learning” about painting has begun again for me.

Re-evaluating  the creative process in it’s broadest sense has now given me a deeper understanding   of what happened to Matisse’s work of the 1950’s and of Mahler’s admission of similar feelings when he captured the unique world of sound, crystallized for all eternity, so poignantly, in “Das Lied von der Erde”. In Hans Bethge’s poems from “Die chinesische Flöte”; darkness, loneliness, longing, melancholy and resignation are all mingled and reconciled within the timeless pages of “Der Abschied”: the crowning adagio - finalé of the work. Perhaps, in time, it may be possible for me to express their sorrowful mystique, timeless philosophies, quasi-Chinese atmosphere and the delicacy of oriental watercolours in my own work.

Although colour has always been the primary element in my paintings since the 1960’s, it has not been seen in it’s more emotional state in my work after the late 1970's until relatively recently. The works which I painted from then, after I moved from Wales to Nottingham, were founded on colour harmonies and combinations which loosely followed theories set out by Josef Albers and Johannes Itten in their treatises on colour. These exercises in the uses of complementary and simultaneous contrasts, the use of tetrads, tertiary colours, close harmonies and chromatic greys, became systems by which I exercised my use of colours at that time in my career. By its nature this kind of response to colour tended to remove and replace any emotional and responsive action of events upon the finished work with theoretical doctrines - however colourful and exciting the result I achieved was. This was the case until the paintings of late 1977 when a more pointillist character returned to my work following the principles of neo-impressionist technique adhered to many years earlier. So I had returned to a method of applying paint to the surface which I had not used for nearly thirty years. Not directly for its divisionist possibilities but for its formal and surface qualities alone as can be seen in the illustrations below.