King Canute

One of  my favourite painters has, for a few years, been Edward Hopper. If you are familiar with his work you know that Hopper, for all his greatness, rarely paints a good human figure. They are too pale, or too bent, or too angular or too.... just not right.

But for  all his faults he has succeeded in describing the essential isolation of humans from each other. A typical Hopperesque painting might have two or three figures in an enclosed environment, each facing away from each other, as if the others did not exist.

In his paintings the protagonists are so close - and yet so far.

Though Hopper places his people in American  environments of the 20's and 30's, logic tells us that this inability to bridge this isolation has been part of human nature since we started as a species.

So thank you Hopper for the inspiration.

And of course that leads us directly to our subject - King Canute. (Well it doesn't really, but I will pretend it does.)

If you are like me, you probably don't know that King Canute, also known  as Cnut, won the English throne in 1016, just 50 years before the Norman 'invasion.' Again so close, and yet so far.

With all the things I know about the Normans (funny helmets, arrow in Harold's eye, Hastings, Bayeaux tapestry, the Droit de signeur) I know nought about King Canute - except that, try as he might, he couldn't stop the encroaching tide.

That isn't to say I don't think about Canute quite often.

In fact I do - most often when I am having my morning run along the beach and my shoes are wet from a sudden surging wave that has caught me unawares.  To be honest, usually I've been daydreaming about making up some scary monster that I can scare kids with in my next 'illustration" - rather than taking in 'the moment'. 

So serves me right.

And to be more honest, at six o'clock this morning, this illustration started as an illustration about a bent and gnarled tree. At about half past six, the tree became an island. At a quarter to seven the island became inhabited with Canute, who refusing to leave the seaside, has been caught by the encroaching tide.

Originally Canute was staring out to sea, on his lonesome. But then I realised he needed more.

He needed enigma.  So at ten minutes to eight, just when I should have been ironing my shirt for work,  I introduced the figure on the right - and suddenly had more than a story. I had drama, plot points, metaphor and balance - not just the balance of composition, but the balance between age and youth, gluttony and moderation, stoicism and distress.

And another figure to clothe.

Oh well.

The final image is below  this text. The dark clouds are above the youthful figure, the light is on the King's old and swollen face.

I wonder what it means?

And I wonder which one is me?

Thank-you for looking. Again. Clicking for big in this case give accidental almost "photo-realism". Something I strive against.

Oh well :)

Saving Myself

Hey hey, after that last post with the semi naked man I thought I'd better redeam myself.

I forgot that I was a painter for a while there :) so thought I'd better stick some of my real life paintings up.

That said, the top picture is of a photograph of a rose I saw in Canberra a few months ago when I went down for the post impressionists' show.  When I looked it through the viewfinder this is what I saw.

It wasn't till I got home that I realised that my breath had been fogging up the image in the viewfinder. So for the final image I cheated and photoshopped it.

The rest of the images bar one are paintings.

The toy boat one is my reaction to those sparkles that I put in my illustrations. One of the people who collect my work was kind enough to buy it.

The second one is a landscape down the road from where my old painting professor lives. This one now lives in the collection of another optometrist who has great style and taste :)

The next three are recent paintings (last two weeks) and haven't been exhibited. Though I used the same dark linen glazed background I tried to bring a bit more colour into them. It makes people think that I am happy!

But seriously, the dark ground helps you to tie the colours in. Theory is that with a limited tonal range you can use as many colours as you like - and the whole will be harmonious. It works most of the time. All these paintings are about 55 by 42 cm?

The one of the beach with houses in the foreground is a segment of a painting I did a few years ago. I like to simplify work by taking photographs of paintings I have done, isolating part of the painting that might make a good composition, then printing that out quite small, so that I have only the basic shapes with which to work up another painting.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it's too abstracted.

The last two images a are of a larger painting 1.2 metres by .9 metres, which is bigger than I like to work. It's a fun painting related to my digital collages I did of Humpty Dumpty a few months ago, and it's called Humpty Dumpty Double Amputee. It's an experiment in built up glazes - so it was quite hard to capture on film due to the reflection etc,

This painting caused me a great deal of stress recently, as I put it in a local prize hanging and the culling committee refused to hang it. When I picked it back up I was informed that there were 'just too many things wrong with it."

As budding novelist I was lucky enough to experience first hand what is called a rainbow of emotions. Disbelief, disgust, revenge, anger, dismay, nausea, destruction of ego, self doubt etc - culminating in  resignation and distrust of the local art community.

Nothing that a glass of good wine wouldn't fix!

The last picture is the painting in my part of the studio that I share with six other painters.

What's next? Well yesterday the huge Dell Laser Colour Printer I ordered arrived. It's so big I can't lift it without help. But the two prints I have done on it are just magic. It's only 1200 DPI by 1200 DPI but on A4 it still looks great. When I get a chance I'll be experimenting with digital transfer technique - so I will be finally able to get some of my illustrations out into the 'real' world.

If you are thinking of buying another inkjet, before you do, check out one of these. It won't do photo quality like a lab will - but I think it will keep me happy.

thanks again for looking at my work.