THE SELF-ISOLATION RESIDENCY 24th JANUARY 2021: DAY 301

New work in progress. Working title: "A Space for Paint."
Oil paint on canvas, 400 x 400 mm

19, 20, 21: Finding a reason to paint, in search of the sublime. 24th January 2021.
Part 16: 'Interpretation, abstraction, illusion. Describe what you actually see?.'

I’ve been having great difficulty with the latest paintings in the series that I’m currently working on. The first 2 or 3 in the series worked really well but the subsequent ones are really not working so well for me. So far, I’ve identified a couple of potential reasons for this ‘block’, they are perhaps related to size and shape. After my first 3 paintings, which I think are all successful, I started to run out of 2ft square canvases, so I moved down to 16 inch square ones instead. I didn’t think that this would pose so many problems, but it really did. For some reason I just can’t work in the same way on this scale. It may be, and in a way I hope that is, to do with the change in the size of brush marks, if that is the problem then I feel that with time and patience it is something that I should be able to resolve. From here I moved back to larger, but rectangular, canvases and once again I’m experiencing the same problems.

I’ve been back to study my successful paintings in relation to my unsuccessful ones and I’ve concluded that it isn’t about size and shape in the way that I’d expected it to be but about how I’ve been approaching the paintings. Regardless of all the things that I’ve thought and written recently I realise that I have once again become too preoccupied with the idea of creating a painting based within the heritage of the landscape and have forgotten that its really about the paint. I do think that this neglect of painting principal has been influenced by this change in size and shape of my canvases;  the change was making me overthink my subject matter and consequently I was drawn back into the wrong context.  

Perhaps I need a sign over my studio door that says: “always remember that your subject is the paint”.

To be continued…