Shaping The Summer-
The studio is heating up this week, so I have relocated to under-a-tree for the last couple of days, which has been beautiful and much, much cooler. I’ve been deciding on the shape of my summer, which I hope will be full of big painting days. I thought it would help to write some blogposts as I go along, to keep track.
Since the weather warmed up, I’ve been starting the day early with a few watercolour drawings made at the kitchen table. The jar of flowers on the window sill usually sets me off- little flashes of sunlight and colour on leaves- the rhythms of the morning- laid down with quick watercolour marks. Sometimes an hour slips by this way with the first coffee of the day.
Summertime sketchbook-
Fluid, fast drawing like this is a real joy and feels like a good record of summertime. Recently I’m using a larger sketchbook which lies flat, so I can work across a double page without weighing down the edges and upsetting cups of coffee. Flower rhythms are already flooding the pages- I like the idea of filling it with a summer and it has just made the journey from kitchen table to studio…
(Click on individual photos to see the whole image)
I’m enjoying the light airiness of these drawings alongside the slow moving, heavily layered oil paintings that are happening in the studio…the two seem to be counter-balancing each other. Some close-up details of oil paintings here. I’m building textures- slowly, slowly. Some of these are heavy with paint and a bit airless at the moment- they need a good blast of wind to breeze through them!
Virginia Woolf-
I’m also reading Virginia Woolf (an ongoing fascination)- her way of shifting scale, focus and perspective seems to give creative permission for all sorts of painterly experiments- something to do with letting thoughts linger, pick up, interweave.
A line here from her ‘Kew Gardens’ (written in 1917),
‘Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk in Kew Gardens in July’
I love this idea- that colour might be flashed into eyes- cast a sort of spell- and that breezes might whisk up minds. I find her trains of thought really exciting. I love her layered up ‘voice of summer’ and the ‘vast green spaces’ that the Kew Gardens snail explores- this multi-dimensional topsy-turvy dazzle feels summery. Her intricate weaving of words conjures flowerbeds, people (introduced by their feet!)- their conversation, memories, thoughts. She puts into words something I’m really interested in painting- a complex merging of inner and outer worlds.
A detail here from one of the larger oil paintings which I’m working on ( still in progress).
So, you find me using two very different ways of painting at the start of July and they seem to be squaring up to each other! There’s a sort of dialogue/challenge being set between the light-on-their-feet watercolours and the weighty oil paintings. I’m not yet sure how it will play out, but I know that at some point the two will converge- they might collide spectacularly or merge together. We’ll see…