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Paintings
'The Bridge', 'Hymn to Silence', 'The Aquaduct', 'The Oldbury Flight', 'Shed and Trees', 'The Quiet Factory', 'The Field' and 'Drawing Study for The Field'.
Description
The genesis for this exhibition was the idea of allowing Horton Estates the opportunity to see 'The Bridge' painting in the situation of their new boardroom. From this it was thought that it would be nice to develop the presentation into a small exhibition showing a representative body of landscape work. Thanks to Julie Seddon Jones of Art Matters and Robert Blyth at Horton for their work in making this possible.
The collection for Horton's Boardroom is in many ways an overview of canal and landscape paintings done over the last decade. 'The Bridge' embodies many of the elements that attracted me to painting the canals of Birmingham. The strong sense of structural space that the canal carries through the landscape seemed a way of making paintings that drew the viewer in rather than projecting out, thus delving into a meaningful dialogue with atmosphere and place.
Of course, this commits one to a traditional method of representation but one has to nail one's flag somewhere. I felt this would offer a surer path than late twentieth century stylistic mish mash as too often found in postmodernism. I have never felt happy with the idea of rejecting unity of form and content. To reinforce this sense of purpose, I held true to the notion of making the pictures from a single point of viewing. Whilst I produce small paintings and drawing studies to develop the larger studio paintings, the initial perception would always be the focus in how the paintings would be resolved.
Two paintings from this exhibition, 'The Oldbury Flight' and 'The Field' might be contrasted in their composition and technique. In 'The Oldbury Flight', the methodology of idea and form developed in the way that the space is not only represented by the strong perspective - leading the eye into the picture - but also the way in which the layers of space are felt in the use of paint that engenders areas of texture and focus against disfurnishment and dissolution. This is true to the feeling of being there, in equating one's sensations of place in the near and distant. The painting therefore balances the solidness of land underfoot against the weightlessness of events in the horizon where land and sky join.
By contrast, 'The Field', painted from studies made in Shropshire, revealed a need for greater simplicity in developing on from the approach outlined above. Here, the strong perspective of previous paintings has been rejected in favour of making the use of paint as the main means of describing the space from densely textured foreground to the softly painted strip of land on the horizon.
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