night

night, les bassacs (oil on linen, 40cm x 40cm)

This is a painting made in the studio from a drawing and a photograph taken earlier in the year.  Interesting what low artificial light does to colour.

collage

landscape IV  (coloured paper, 25cm x 32cm)

I quite often have a parallel activity going on alongside oil painting, something related but different, to try and stop going stale.  At the moment that means making collages - ripping and cutting paper makes you think about making images differently.  Ground and motif become the same thing, and you can't get bogged down detail.  It feels to me to be a bit closer to sculpture, manipulating materiels and physically arranging them.  I have been using some of my own paintings as a starting point, re-exploring compositional elements and pushing them somewhere new.

refinery

refinery, etang du berre (32cm x 25cm, oil on wood)

The weather hasn't been too good recently, so I have been working more in the  studio.  I have been working from drawings, photographs and memory.  In the studio I tend to work on images over a series of sessions, letting one layer dry a bit and then working over it.  I quite often make a painting quickly, then scrape it back so that I am left with a ghost of an image that forms the basis for further work.  The scraped back image dries nice and fast, so I can work on it next day.  Sometimes I  'tonk' the original image. ' Tonking' refers to blotting a painting with newspaper, so it sucks out a lot of the oil and solvent in the paint, allowing it to dry quickly and removing any accumulated fussiness.  I think the process is named after Henry Tonks, an English painter who was a formidable and influential teacher at the Slade school of art in the 1920's.  Thanks, Henry.