Here I am heading towards the last week of July and every surface in the house and studio seems to be covered with drying puddles of colour or sketchbook pages. I’m having a summer of long painting days and writing some blogposts as I go. It’s a time for experimenting and trying out ideas at the moment- letting everything expand outwards before I focus in on the clearest, essential threads. This is the second of what I hope will be several blogposts (a link here https://www.alisoncritchlow.co.uk/shaping-the-summer/ to the first one if you missed it).
I’ve been pouring very fluid paint to start some new work while oil paintings are drying off nicely and almost ready for final flashes of colour across encrusted, chunky paint- those ones are still face to the wall for now. Meanwhile daily watercolours are ongoing, joined by collage and some outrageous dripping! It’s a messy process- an outside observer could be forgiven for thinking it’s total chaos – but the mayhem is giving rise to an exciting free flow of thoughts and associations… of reading, drawing, painting, pouring, scraping, glueing, ripping, masking, assembling, editing, reflecting. I’m attempting to share this process. A few close up photos of various paintings in the mix here – all of them are in progress (click on images to see a larger version)
I’m also getting unreasonably excited about shadows playing on painted marks. At first I thought to set up a light in the studio, casting shadows on cut out marks, but soon realised it would be too static and controlled- it’s not the shadow itself that’s interesting me, its the flickering movement and the unpredictability- that’s where the magic lies. It’s in the interaction of chance, time, airflow, sun, paint- and the idea of something external activating a painting. Monet apparently liked blue bearded irises to be planted in half-shadow – he thought their colours were seen at their best that way. I love this thought, that half-shadow might enhance colour-or perception…or was it the resulting dappled light that really did it for him?
Summer reading-
Virginia Woolf’s diaries are a revelation! I love the way she uses them to talk to herself ( and her future self). I bought a second hand copy of the selected version- edited by Leonard Woolf, and I’m reading it slowly alongside making daily watercolour drawings in what seems to have become my summer sketchbook. As Virginia Woolf reads back through her diary, she describes the ‘rapid haphazard gallop at which it swings along’. She says, ‘if I stopped and took thought, it would never be written at all: and the advantage of the method is that it sweeps up accidentally several stray matters which I should exclude if I hesitated, but which are the diamonds of the dustheap’
What a great phrase!
Similarly, things emerge in these watercolours – there’s something very helpful in the non-stopness of them. They are becoming a habit- a bit like a visual diary- there’s no pressure on them– they are a means to an end and they often throw up new ways forward.
A few photos here of the watercolour pages ( click on individual pictures to see the whole image)
Studio progress-
The ease and fluidity of the watercolours is starting to spill into the oil paintings. I’m beginning a couple of new larger pieces while the rest have a bit more drying time. Close up photos here of the first stages and a small painting currently on the easel. Onwards…
