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February 21, 2008
Portraits, Leith, Cyprus and India
Time marches on. It is now nearly the end of term 2 at Edinburgh College of Art and I am sitting at home, having taken a few days off with a bad bug. This has given me time at last to freshen up my website and preen some of the gallery pages from all the inconsequential work. Since I started this version of the website in 2004, I tended just to put up all the work I did at the time, probably just to prove that I am still making work. When I was painting in Hastings, I was just so pleased to be making any art at all, that every scrap of creativity went up. Now, with the chance to review and edit it down to one page, my Hastings period reveals to me a time of relearning my skills and re-evaluating what picture making means to me. I am still very proud of the fact that I have taken risks in my employment, which has always been informed by trying to find the right balance between making art and facilitating education.
So, now I find myself in year in to my new life in Edinburgh. Catie has moved up and is also painting and teaching. My job role at eca has been fluid flexible and quite demanding. But, I am still managing to paint as I have finally realised that I have to use most of my available free time to make art if I am ever going to develop. This has meant far fewer opportunities to see family and friends and far less gallivanting across the country or abroad.
From the period I moved to Leith with Catie, I have solely used the interior of our rented Georgian townhouse flat as a backdrop for subject matter. I have done more direct observational drawing and painting than I have since I was a student, and I have learned so much by doing so. I think it has recharged my pictorial armoury and freed me from the often-tiresome need for inventing compositional devices. Using a combination of biographical with observed topographical elements has allowed me to reflect on a more explicit portrait of my new life with Catie. While I have maintained my gut need for flippancy and irony in the use of a collection of soft toy animals, I am trying to evoke a greater depth of time and place.
Most recently, I have completed a large two panel portrait of Catie with our soft toys (the bears!) revealing the exuberant and delightful space we live in. The carrot for this was to enter the BP portrait award. While I am pleased with the ambition of the picture and its sense of place, I am not sure whether it works on the level of a portrait and I am not optimistic that it will be successful in being accepted for the show.
Here are eight stages of the portrait which I did almost entirely from working in situe over about 5 weekends.
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I have three other things I am developing;
In December, I am showing at the Otter Gallery in Chichester, a compendium of works I did from the times I visited and worked Cyprus from 2002 to the present. There is also a possibility to show it in Cyprus College of Art later and I am trying to pull together a catalogue and possibly find a venue in Edinburgh also. I have never shown most of this work before and I am delighted to finally have the opportunity. I hope to make one more visit to Cyprus to complete the cycle of work for the show.
While I have been living in Leith and particularly Leith Links, I have started to research its history and how it remains such a distinctive and vibrant part of Edinburgh. The history of the Links themselves is fascinating, having been the place of the first golf course and the base for Oliver Cromwell’s men. Therefore, my next series of artworks are going to use my research as the background for what I hope will be a new pictorial development in my work. For further information see here.
I am also trying to find ways to make an extended visit to India to develop new lines of research. I have discovered that in the new India with one of the fasting growing economies in the world, there is a newfound confidence in contemporary painting that uses narrative and sense of place. Directly at odds with esoteric contemporary western art, this new art celebrates both hand skills and crafts, yet places itself in a world of mass media and conceptual ideas. I feel there is much for me to learn and experience and I am waiting with baited breadth, the result of a research funding application.
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