THE SELF-ISOLATION RESIDENCY 28th FEBRUARY 2021: DAY 336

New painting: "A Sudden Lightness".
Oil paint on canvas, 610 x 610 mm.

19, 20, 21: Finding a reason to paint, in search of the sublime. 28th February 2021.
Part 38: 'Interpretation, abstraction, illusion.
An Unsettling Appeal: Insearch of the Sublime.

This grouping of the edited human figure, basically the head and shoulders/torso, combined with the related area occupied by the extended context behind them gives us the most common format of our portrait painting. It of course has also gone on to give its name to the geometrical format of an image referred to as being portrait; an upright rectangle where the vertical axis is long than the horizontal one. So much for now about the portrait.

When in my original note on this subject I listed the three primary forms of figurative painting as portrait, still-life and landscape it possibly made you imagine that I would talk about them in that order; but I’m afraid not. There was a very good reason behind me ordering the painting forms in that way, it will however not become clear until much later in this essay. For reasons which I hope will become much more rapidly clear I am now moving directly from my consideration of the portrait to the nature of the landscape. When I began talking about the nature of the portrait, I used the following two sentences which I will quote here once again because they contain just as much relevance to the nature of the landscape:

“All painting is a form of encounter, and it can be argued that this is particularly true of figurative painting. The observer interacts with the stimulus provided by the painting, firstly as an object; we sense that we have a foreknowledge of what a painting is and may do, even as we approach it from a distance, followed by the stimulus of the image in holds. “

To be continued...