I have finally started work on a long overdue commission piece for my really good friends who live up in Aberdeen. The image was taken on our bike trip around Scotland this year. It was the view from our campsite on our last night when we wild camped not far from Balmoral castle on the river dee. I am excited to make a piece for their beautiful home thathas been the scene of many happy times for me. Here is the piece after the first two days work.

Wild Camp View - In progress

The colour is bitter chocolate and sits really well as softer replacement for the black areas of the picture.

I have talked often about my interest in those moments in our lives that become somehow bigger or more significant than others. It is an interest that drives my art practice and I have little doubt that I have become an addict to those kind of moments. They come in a myriad of ways. From the glorious sensation of acceleration on my motorbike to a reflective moment in nature or a chance encounter with a stranger.

A thought occurred to me while walking up Tryfan in Snowdonia. I recorded it into my phone pretty breathlessly and I sit here now trying to make sense of it. I was stood on one of the steep paths just before a scramble looking across to the peaks opposite. They are peaks that I have stood on. More than just that though I had a pretty epic and scary moment on those mountains. Lost in cloud I walked with a friend off the wrong side of the peak. We got lost and I got very (disproportiantly) scared when I fell in icy water.

The thing that occurred to me as I looked across and remembered standing on that mountain looking at this one, was that it seemed so unreal. That the picture of myself in my mind was just that, a picture. No physical evidence of my ever being there. I felt like I understood what memory is and how we collect our experiences for the first time. I wondered if it was really ever necessary to actually stand on that mountain at all. I remembered that day standing looking at the spot on which I was now standing and imagining myself stood here. There seems little difference between imagining and remembering.

I thought about my art and the way that I select second hand stories, experiences and images for the most part and using them to describe my own. I wonder now whether there is any difference, in the sense of how a piece of art looks and communicates between one that is inspired by a remembered and experienced event and one that is “untrue”.

I will keep thinking about this and unpacking it and maybe one day I will be able to write it in a way that makes a bit more sense. It is strange how being among these mountains gives access to another level of thinking and feeling. truly awesome.

This is on the way up. Rob waiting for me and giving some sense of scale.

Untitled (as yet) in progress. Oil on Canvas

I feel that the twisted and distorted form is starting to take shape slowly and the surface is building. I hope to get a sense of a fleeting glimpse, a glance down as you jump the stream and what you see is not quite reality. I realise that the position of the viewer is of looking down at this reflection, it is the the viewer looking back at themselves. As well as a sense of movement and of the reflected tree canopy I hope that there will be a sense of a form that should not balance and feels forever about to topple.

I made my first tentative steps in the print workshop today. I have a stock of aluminium sheet that I was intending to paint on but the sheets are a bit small for that.

drypoint plate

They are the perfect size to make drypoint print plates though, so yesterday I scribed my first experimental with image. Taking the image of the blurred leaf photographs as inspiration, I thought that the intensity of a crosshatched line would describe the darkness well.

Shot of the first print. Not great lighting!

This painting has sat still for a little while, I am not sure why I felt it difficult to continue. I find the potential of paintings sometimes a little daunting. I am learning that I often over paint. I do this because of a lack of confidence in what I have to offer. Trying to be all things, to balance enough concept or intellectual underpinning with a sense of honesty and to build that sense of intensity and heightened emotion. It always feels so much better when I just paint. I only remember that though after wrestling with worry for a while. This is how it is progressing.

Orange Knickers, Gloss on Aluminium, Dean Melbourne 2009

On friday I delivered seven gloss pieces to IceTwice Gallery in Olney, Buckinghamshire. I was so nervous and to be honest I have put off going for a few weeks, those paintings just kept staring at me from the corner of the studio though. In the end it went really well and Kim at the gallery was enthusiastic and really supportive. It is great to be back in a position of having some gallery representation. It is worth saying that I was in danger of spending more than I could earn on books as IceTwice has the most amazing collection of books I have ever seen at a gallery.

It would be really interesting to hear how any of you other creatives feel about or cope with the awkward embarrassing delivery of work and talking about money!

The Gallery also has a blog her on wordpress. I’m also really pleased to say that my talented friend Rachel Marsden has started a blog called Rachel Marsden’s Words.

“These words will daydream and deliberate the start and development of my PhD studies at BIAD alongside the development of my artistic practice and general click-clack of the typewriter keys against a fresh piece of paper.”

I think that Rachel has a lot of good intelligent things to say and I think this make excellent reading.

This is my next attempt at something for the Ebony Tower project. This is the second of the big canvases I had and it wasn’t going to be this image ,but at the last moment it seemed like the only thing that it could be. It is inspired by the scene in the book where the group visit the lake for a picnic and while Breasley sleeps the other three move of and end up swimming naked. This is a leap in a literal and physcological sense for David.

The imagery that the book conjures brings to my mind Titian’s The Andrians and Bacchus and Ariadne. They have been in my mind since first reading. The twisting and dramatic poses and the way that the figures seem at one with nature. In the second image a face has appeared quite by accident and the form has begun to grow.

This is a modern view-point and the image could only exist with use of the photographic image but that image is now becoming something more for me. It is about reaching I think and glimpsing something as reward for bravery. Only done two sessions on this so a long way to go yet!

I am always on the look out for images that carry the same atmosphere that I look for in my own work. I was really excited to find a book in a second hand book stall in Llangollen, North Wales. It was a book of soft focus late 70’s maybe early eighties photography that accompanied the Poetry of the ancient greek poet Sappho.

The book was really expensive so I was a bit naighty and took some shots of the images on my phone! I felt like James Bond stealing the plans of an evil genius.

What I got where even more distorted and strangely cropped images of odd lesbian erotica. The mood of them sits well with The Ebony Tower (dispite no lesbian activity in the story.) The theme of back to nature and a sense of Eden comes through. The other images here are distorted and cropped images from 60’s and 70’s playboy mags. What you see here are just projections for me to decide on scale and how I will treat the image.

I thought it might be nice to let you see this stage and get some of your thoughts so please leave me some feedback!

This last image is an experiment painting over another painting, not sure where its going but i thought I would share.

I attended a welcome lunch today at Wolverhampton University to mark the start of my time there on the AA2A scheme. It feels like it will be a big although temporary change to my practice for the next few months. I am really excited about the possible outcomes of taking part in the scheme which comes to a close with an exhibition alongside the MA shows next year.

So far I have been really impressed with the way that both the University and AA2A have treated the scheme in a very professional way and made us very welcome today.

I have some nerves about going back into an academic environment, especially when I studied for my degree at this Uni. (10years ago). Also being forced to work alongside others in a print workshop. I know that this will be great but I have been used to working on my own for a long time now.

So I plan to try to achieve a lot in the period. Firstly to create prints that will contribute to the Ebony tower project. I think that they might come in the form of etchings. I also want to add to my linocut collection and produce an exhibitable body of prints that follow on from “the longing”.

As well as these two project I hope to explore screenprint on aluminium some digital printing processes and make full advantage of lectures and seminars. Not much then. It will be really interesting to see just how much the decision to take part in this changes things for me.

please have a look around the AA2A site and networking site AA2A.biz there are some very talented artists and craftspeople. It may be that the scheme is right for you too!

I have added a link in my side bar to my Flickr acount. I am using this as a catalogue of my work of the last few (ten!) years. It was an interesting process going through my portfolio. Anyway have a mooch through and see what you think!

Here is one I had forgotten about.