THE SELF-ISOLATION RESIDENCY 18th MARCH 2021: DAY 354

New painting in progress, Working title: "To travel, to grow (detail)."
Oil paint on canvas, 610 x 610 mm. 

A Critical Mass of Memories: Landscapes of the Mind.

Some people may consider the idea to be both bizarre and counterintuitive, but my current series of ‘landscape’ paintings is being extracted wholly from my own psyche. This body of work is being developed during my self-isolation as a direct reaction to my, and to the global populations, current condition. Of course, during lockdown, I, like everyone else, am unable to experience the world afresh in the way that I normally would through travel. Having said that over my decades as an artist I have accumulated sketchbooks full of studies and albums crammed with photos, which I could have chosen to use as subjects for these paintings. So why haven’t I?

In an attempt to produce new, fresh work which both reacts to the global pandemic, while it also explores the innerworkings of the artists prison, I have chosen to utilise a third resource available to me which has been accrued in conjunction with the physical renderings of sketches and photographs, memories. I have amassed a head full of images and ideas which interact with each other within this very personal workspace to produce new visions and notions; this is resource which I am now utilising as the fodder for my new work’s reflection on our common state of, oxymoron though it may be, shared-isolation.

Let me clarify, although these are not necessarily renderings of specific places, they are at the same time not what would be considered to be ‘made-up’ images. Rather these are amalgamations of visions, ideas, feelings which I have retained whilst perhaps making those drawings or photographs of specific places and it is now to these impressions that I turn as a vehicle upon which I hang my most plastic of paint. I say these images are amalgamations, which is I believe one way to consider them, particularly if one regards them purely as images. However really, these works are visual expressions of ideas, experiences and feelings. Both feelings which I have retained regarding particular, places, but perhaps moreover they are new considerations which I need to express through the plasticity of paint.

To be continued...