i took some of these small paintings on paper for a little walk to the end of the garden this week...
to the shaded spot where the rust continues to grow and bloom in many hues of red, orange, brown, violet and grey...
where a light dusting of green mould or algae turns the old reclaimed wood from a dull pallet brown into a more vibrant shade of green...
where everything is quite simple, rustic, earthy, and unrefined in character......i don't have a good tripod for my camera, so i had to stay quite still to take these photographs, keep a steady hand, propped up against the nearby sprawling branches of a large, overgrown orange blossom (syringa) shrub. i got quite cold after a short while and so my good self & the small paintings promptly came back inside to the house again.here are some photographs of some small canvases i have made, now known as the travelling iCons...
bali 2010, 15cm x 15cm, collagraph print on paper on canvas
nepal 2010, 15cm x 15cm, collagraph on paper on canvas
pueblo 2010, 15cm x 15cm, collagraph on paper on canvas...just thought it would be interesting to show them in a different light, a different context...
on blackbirds, nests, and the garden
over the last week a few hours have been spent out in the garden, on some required 'tidying-up tasks', pruning back overgrown hedges and shrubs, fixing up fences (there is always more work to do, it seems).back in the summer i took these two photographs of a blackbird's nest that i had discovered in one hedge, images which i later accidentally erased (hence the previous post on rescuing deleted photographs from a camera) but i have found them again, safe and well...
[a blackbird's nest, 18 july 2010]from the two blackbirds i had observed nesting in the tangle of clematis prunings earlier in the spring, i found a new nest in a different location - a small incident of nature quietly at work...
[baby blackbirds, 25 july 2010]in the autumn clear-up i have subsequently discovered many more birds nests of varying sizes and designs, suggesting that the areas of the garden which were left most undisturbed had become a sanctuary to nature... and i did wonder if any of the garden birds would be returning to use these nests again in the spring; i found the answer to whether birds do or don't reuse their nests on the RSPB website...
yesterday, i spied this intricate drawing on a leaf...
does this humble garden 'scene' exude a little of the wabi sabi aesthetic, mentioned in the previous post, about art and wabi sabi? it is part of the boundary fencing that my neighbour had put up a few years ago (sans chamber pot, of course) - i like it, even though it is far from perfect......
on art, painting stripes, and wabi sabi
two small abstract(ed) paintings on paper from the 100 paintings on paper experiment (now known informally as the 'chromatids') there are one hundred of these small paintings but i do not think these two paintings have made an appearance here before.
LXIII and XLVII, painting on paper, 15cm x 15cmthese two small paintings can be viewed larger on my art for sale from the studio pagesimple stripes or striations, as it turned out, were the most direct, uncomplicated means of exploring elemental, rustic colours and textures on a very small scale - they also began to be about exploring a quiet narrative within the process, of texture & surface and how simple stripes or colours interacted within the ragged, irregular edge or boundary of the paper - this simple pattern of stripes and striations echoed what i had seen and observed in the rural environment where i live - from barns and sheds, the rustic juxtapositions of colour and texture in weathered, worn surfaces or agricultural structures - all the things which appealed to me visually and aesthetically.these close-up, 'abstract' photographs were taken in early 2008, shortly after i was given a new camera to play with...
down on the farm...recalling again how this experimental series of one hundred paintings first came about (a dull, drizzly grey day in early november 2008) has caused me once more to muse upon the japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi, an appreciation of the understated, the transient, ephemeral or imperfect.for myself, understanding the aesthetic or philosophy of wabi sabi, it seems to first arise within, in a quiet sensing, a feeling, an intuition or an awareness, that momentarily surrenders up the ego in reverence for the humble beauty of the object or scene, that acknowledges the relevance of time, use or location upon it, and that it can be experienced any time or anywhere if one is mindful enough to see it...there is definitely something in wabi sabi that speaks very much about my own artistic inspiration, something that i can trace right back to my mixed media collages, but i am not sure one can faithfully make an artform out of it, for wabi sabi is what it is...in early 2005 i sketched out a rough mindmap about my perception of the local landscape and the rural environment, in which transience, imperfection and the effects of time surfaced as factors or keywords. later, in september 2007, i contemplated where i was headed within the environmental nature of my art, and i was reminded again of things that are overlooked, discarded or rejected, that situations change, that nothing is permanent, or perfect. i had also briefly referred to solitude a couple of months earlier and the relevance of time in the making of my art.i didn't write anything in this journal (blog) for many months, except for the posting of some photographs of a painting i had finished, a painting appropriately entitled shrede (an archaic spelling of 'shred'), implying a slow scraping back or paring down of layers, and what remains, tattered, torn and fragmented.the outward signs of time passing, transience and imperfection, and an inner sense of solitude, eventually led on to a slow meandering, philosophical path eastwards, towards all things quiet, gentle, calm and a little bit zen, one that made me realise that an awareness of situations or things could mean something more than the sum of their parts. it did not need a name, but it offered up some new interpretations......