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