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| snow white and rose red oil on canvas 72x96inches |
I am
currently working on a series of paintings for a solo show in November of this
year. I usually theme my work loosely
around a title. This helps me set the
scene and mood for a series of connected work that hopefully will reinforce my
ideology and theory behind painting.
It sounds all very premeditated and grown up but it feels very far from
that for me. I find the whole business
of creating paintings illogical and chaotic, its like trying to put loose
feathers into a pillowcase; you know what you want to achieve and you know what
you have, to achieve it: but the actual doing of it seems at first an impossible
task, but as the work progresses, you get inspired by getting through each
hurdle and the comforting knowledge that you have achieved it before and so the
confidence builds as the work emerges and starts to feed back clues and
information on how to proceed to the finish.
So for me building work around a theme is one way of controlling the
endless possibilities and keeping the work on some sort of intellectual track.
For this
upcoming show I am using the working title Scheherazade. In itself, it is a great looking word, even
though I can’t pronounce it!! Of course
it is the Arabian tale of the princess
Scheherazade who has to make up an elaborate and absorbing story for the
King, who having been cuckolded by a previous wife, has lost his confidence in
relationships and so like every story-book King must do, having spent one night
with his new bride, has them executed.
Scheherazade however is a realist and has an imagination, and so imbarks
on her 1001 nights of Arabian tales, and so seals her fate of living a long and
married life.
I have
always felt a deep connection to the old fairy tales of my childhood in
the Grimm's and Anderson's gruesome stories
of dysfunctional families set in deep dark forests.
I started
work on this show last summer, with a huge 6 foot by 8 foot canvas, the largest I
have worked on to date. The subject was Snow
white and Rose Red, two sisters who live with their mother in a cosy cottage at
the edge of a forest, and where one stormy night they hear a knock on the door
and open it to a huge grisly bear faint with fatigue and hunger. They of course, after their initial surprise
and horror, take him into to the bosom of their home and later when he turns
back into the handsome prince that he always was, he marries one of the sisters.
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| flowers and butterflies 36x30 inches |
The colours
in this painting are very like some of the work in the Walled Garden collection
as there was a lot of follow through.
However in Scheherazade I am trying to introduce a warmer palette of
stronger reds and yellows and the rest of the exhibition reflects this, as can be seen with' Fishermans Still life'.
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| Fisherman's Still life 92x102cm |
I decided
to compositionally divide' Rose Red and Snow White' down the middle and use this line of
symmetry to balance each side out by creating cross links between the two halves of
the painting with diagonal lines and colour- echoing. Each side works as an independent
painting so as to enable the viewer to take in the imagery in a more
accommodating scale. The face of the
bear in the centre of the painting is sort of unsettling and weird but its what I wanted to
achieve, a slight threat to the domestic scene inside, however to subdue the intense impact of his voyeurism I
painted him in monochromes very near to the ground colour.
My other
paintings in this collection have explored other fairy tales such as
Cinderella, the Fisherman and his wife and the Little Mermaid, but as always
with my subject matter the literal story telling is definately second place to the colour, design and
composition of my work, which is where my heart lies.
