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"Why should you think that beauty, which is the most precious thing in the world, lies like a stone on the beach for the careless passer by to pick up idly ? Beauty is something wonderful and strange.."
From The Moon and Sixpence by W Somerset Maugham 1919

Oil on canvas Contours and Tracks Pen and ink Medway at Rochester

I had a quote from Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim written on the wall of the studio when I was at college,
" ...absolute Truth, which, like Beauty itself, floats elusive, obscure, half submerged, in the silent waters of mystery" , I wanted the paintings to live up to this powerful invocation. I wrote it there to appear erudite no doubt. 
   In Lord Jim. how does Jim reconcile his keen sense of failure with his continued existence?
  " I may have jumped, but I don't run away "

        

Four watercolour landscape studies

I am discovering , instead of a sense of smug certainty I was hoping for in later life, that it is all a mystery, if not a deepening mystery

Latest work

All the colours are here..

Clouds pile and scud over a winter sky, there is the hollow of a valley side, the fugitive sinuous curve of a track, the line echoes the horizon , buildings appear between trees. Fields and hedges form shapes, and the idea of a map with its signifiers and ciphers seeks to be represented

Paintings hanging for the Art Trail 2013

 Paintings hanging at Regent Salisbury for the 2013 Art Trail, thanks to everyone who came along and left their generous, and positive messages, and to all those people I spoke to who liked the work

Studio with work hung for the Salisbury Art Trail

Views of the studio during the Arts Trail, Friday drinks went well at Regent in Salisbury, sadly I didn't take my camera, however a couple of real photographers were there, and hope to get their images soon. The trail continues until next Sunday at Regent and the studio in Wilton, all details on the Plain Arts website

Salisbury Art Trail venues

Sketch from my sketchbook Ugford Clump at sunset

A few minutes walk up the road, across the railway track, and on to the hill , the nights are closing in and dark clouds gather behind the trees of Ugford Clump. A distinct drop in temperature, the autumnal sense that summer is over.

A detail of the large landscape

Is there a better evocation of the English landscape

"There are certain sheets of the one-inch Ordinance Survey maps which one can sit down and read like a book for an hour on end, with growing pleasure and imaginative excitement. One dwells upon the infinite variety of the place names, the delicate nerve-like complexity of roads and lanes, the siting of the villages and hamlets, the romantic moated farmsteads in deep country, the churches standing alone in the fields, the patterns made by the contours or by the way the parish boundaries fit into one another.."
 W.G. Hoskins "The Making of the English Landscape" 1955 Hodder and Stoughton re-published 2013 by Little Toller Books

On paths and marks in the landscape

"Old paths rarely vanish, unless the sea eats them or Tarmac covers them. They survive as subtle landmarks, evident to those who know how to look..." from The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane published by Penguin books

Where I am calling from

Though nothing is explicit within the painting there are triggers,implications of landscape features. The curve of a track on a chalk down, the shape of a field, or corner of a meadow.
It doesn't matter where this comes from, they appear. They may be happy coincidences. A feature which is in a piece of flint, survives through a watercolour and on into the oil painting. The feature has been unlocked. Perhaps it is not a trackway but a scar.
  These things could all be dismissed as unimportant, anything you look at hard enough reveals some shape, like clouds in the sky.

Oil on canvas work in progress , and the studio

Beginning of a new picture

A new canvas , made to order, a luxury, and an act of faith. A coloured ground of venetian red and yellow ochre, the first layer of paint going on

A painting from a few years ago oil on canvas

Maybe I could use the word Landschaft or Paesaggio for these paintings, the English word Landscape seems too imprecise.

 In the morning I go to the top of the house and look out over the valley with its thatched cottages, and willow trees, where the river lies hidden. The wooded hill climbs on the other side and then ends with a tree fringed horizon. I stare at this point, and it fascinates me, the nature of the edge, the line between the earth and sky.
It echoes the line between dark and light, and by association good and evil, heaven and earth.
 Perhaps without division there is nothing, a thing which is in perfect balance and harmony emanates no phenomena, everything exists in opposition, in struggle, in conflict.
 The first paintings I made were from photographs, and they were generally well received, and sold well, I took photographs all the time, and have three memory sticks full of images. I kept sketch books all the time, but I couldn't turn the sketches into paintings, I needed the exact information of a photograph to look at.
 Over time I wanted to work only from life, to avoid the photographs, and started to look at stones that I picked up on walks around the chalk downs. I thought the stones , mainly flints, were an echo of the landscape, its terroir .I keep sketching the landscape, with its sinuous lines and the shapes of fields,  of trees and the horizon line. This is the direction that I would like to go in, I don't know where it will lead, and that is more exciting than anything else.

I don't know if anybody is interested in all of this , or whether they just want to see the pictures, maybe they will let me know.   

Landscape : oil on canvas

Happiness by Raymond Carver

So early it's still almost dark out
I'm near the window with coffee
and the usual early morning stuff
that passes for thought
........
..Such beauty that for a minute
death and ambition, even love
doesn't enter into this

Happiness it comes on
Unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really
Any early morning talk about it

 abbreviated from Happiness published in All of Us, Tess Gallagher 1998

Spring sunlight in the studio

Going to the studio is now like inhabiting my head. All those images that I thought were worth preserving, or that I wanted to understand. That stack of pictures is a timeline of my passions

Watercolour and pencil study

Primavera ; sunlight returns like a benediction, hope and colour after a long cold winter

I ticked off the things I could do, being a painter seemed the best use of my time, Yet I still feel shamefaced about the time spent in the studio, as if my life is more justified spent elsewhere. 

Watercolour and pencil on paper, study

Chapter 29 Lord Jim

"But do you notice how, three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines, the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilization wither and die, to be replaced by pure exercises of imagination, that have the futility, often the charm, and sometimes the deep hidden truthfulness, of works of art ?"

Work in progress

This is what's happening in the studio..