This is a painting of the lake and chimney at Holyhead Breakwater Country Park. It’s based on an early morning plein air study from a couple of years ago (which can be seen below for comparison) and is painted in thick impasto with a palette knife.
Once again, I’m using flat planes/blocks of colour as a deliberate counterpoint to my attempt to depict the space and light in the scene.
I was once described by a colleague as ‘someone who likes to draw boxes around things’. In my defence, I was studying a Systems Engineering module with the Open University at the time, a discipline which requires one to define and ‘map’ the contents and edges of, as well as the relationships between, sub-systems and elements that, together, make up a complex whole.
The reason for dredging that anecdote up is that, recently, I’ve been thinking about that comment, and feel that it goes some way to explaining my use of ‘fragmented’ flat planes of colour that I seem to be pursuing more and more in my paintings in that I’m trying to draw boxes around the visual sub-systems and colour elements that make up a scene.
Having shied away from oils in favour of acrylics for years, I am finding these current experiments using a palette knife and impasto to be hugely enjoyable and I feel like this new way of working is really helping me to balance my desire to ‘draw boxes around things’ with a willingness to be less precious about maintaining crisp edges.
Plein Air Study of Holyhead Breakwater Country Park (acrylic on paper 59cm x 43cm)
Four Mile Bridge Estuary (Oil on canvas 60cm x 50cm)Four Mile Bridge Estuary Texture Detail
This my latest painting of Four Mile Bridge (Pontrhydybont) and is based on a plein air sketch completed some time ago (see picture below).
It’s one of my favourite painting spots on Anglesey, and one I keep returning to again and again.
Whilst continuing to investigate using flat planes of colour to depict space, I decided to really let rip with the palette knife and see what the effect of texturing those planes would produce. Great fun!
Plein Air Study Four Mile Bridge Estuary (acrylic on paper 59cm x 42cm)
This is my latest painting which is of Holyhead Breakwater Country Park. It’s based on a plein air study from a year or two ago (see below).
It continues my attempts to strike a balance between figuration and abstraction using flat blocks of colour to represent the planes of the forms/scene.
This is my third attempt at reworking this picture. In its earlier versions/states, the colour planes were very smoothly painted but, inspired by my recent palette knife paintings of Parys Mountain, I chose to rework it with thick impasto acrylic so as to ‘animate’ the surface.
Holyhead Breakwater Country Park Plein Air Sketch I (acrylic on paper 60cm x 40cm)
This is my latest painting of Parys Mountain which, again, was worked up from a plein air sketch produced during the Mike Knowles landscape painting week at the beginning of July.
It continues the series of paintings investigating the use of flat shapes to represent three dimensional space on a two dimensional surface and is another attempt to visually ‘fold’ or ‘buckle’ the painting surface in order to recreate the sensation of standing within the huge space, trying to make sense of the abstract colours and shapes.
It’s painted in impasto oil on stretched canvas using a palette knife to introduce texture.
In it, I am seeking to recreate the memory of the dazzling array of colours on show, as well as the feeling of distance and space in the huge, man-made quarry.
By returning once again to using flat shapes, I’m continuing to investigate and attempting to highlight the contradictions inherent in representing such a vast scene on a flat surface with only the thickness of the paint to differentiate between the ‘figure’ and ‘ground’.
During the workshop, Mike had suggested I look into the work of Nicolas de Stael and so I experimented with laying heavy impasto paint on with a palette knife when reworking this piece.
I’d love to know which you prefer; the finished piece or the original sketch (or neither!), so please drop me a line and tell me which is your preference and why!
This is a painting of a seated nude in acrylic on canvas and is based on a (very rough/experimental!) life drawing sketch, which I’ve appended below, in case it’s of interest.
It’s part of a continuing series in which I’m investigating how far it’s possible to push the use of flat colour and interlocking shapes to represent the planes of the human figure in space whilst balancing figuration and abstraction.
Seated Nude IV study (acrylic on paper 42cm x 60cm)
The Shadow He Pursues (Charcoal and Gesso on Canvas Board 60cm x 60cm)
This was the third and final submission to the Kyffin Williams Drawing Prize to be held at the Oriel, and I’m pleased to say that this piece was accepted!
One summer evening, not long after I arrived at Pwllfanogl, a friend came to visit me with his small son aged five. As we stood at the water’s edge, with gentle waves breaking at our feet, the little boy looked up at me:
‘What will happen to you when you die?’ he asked with a look of concern on his face. I knew I had to answer with a confidence I did not possess.
‘Oh, it will be wonderful,’ I said. ‘I shall slip into the sea and be swept away by the water, and I shall be carried under the bridges and away to Penmon and the open sea. Oh, yes, it will be rather wonderful.’
As he listened to me the worry seemed to disappear from his face and he ran off to throw stones into the waters that were to carry me away …
This was such a beautiful story and conjured up such a wonderful image of hope in the face of the inevitability of death.
It also brought to mind a vision of Sir Kyffin standing on the shore of the Menai Straits on his beloved Anglesey and staring at the other love of his life, Snowdonia. Snowdon itself appears in outline in my drawing, and this seemed apt since I’m led to believe that Yr Wyddfa translates as ‘The Tomb’, although I’ve been unable to confirm it with Welsh speaking friends.
In one of his talks, Sir Kyffin also spoke about his encounters with a Brocken Spectre, something with which the hill farmers he so often portrayed would have been familiar, so I’ve incorporated it into the drawing as well as making reference to it with the title, taken from the final line of Samuel Taylor Coleridge‘s poem “Constancy to an Ideal Object”:
And art thou nothing? Such thou art, as when
The woodman winding westward up the glen
At wintry dawn, where o’er the sheep-track’s maze
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glist’ning haze,
Sees full before him, gliding without tread,
An image with a glory round its head;
The enamoured rustic worships its fair hues,
Nor knows he makes the shadow he pursues!
As with the other pieces in the series, I’ve attempted to draw wider parallels within this submission by metamorphosing the shadow/Brocken Spectre into the silhouette of the Rev. Michael D. Jones, who was the visionary who “proposed setting up a Welsh-speaking colony away from the influence of the English language“, which led to the creation of the Welsh enclave, Yr Wladfa (The Colony) in Patagonia, Argentina.
In making this allusion, I was trying to suggest that, whilst death comes to us all, you can’t kill an idea, especially when they are passed on one from one generation to the next.
The series of three drawings is intended to pay homage to the life of Sir Kyffin Williams in this, the centenary of his birth, and they were inspired by reading numerous articles, writings and speeches by and about him. Any historical or interpretive inaccuracies are entirely my own!
The full list of drawings submitted to the competition is as follows:
The Kyffin Williams Drawing Prize “was founded in 2009 by the Kyffin Williams Trust and Oriel Môn; and works in partnership with the National Museum Wales, Cardiff and the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. The competition – which is held every three years – aims to promote and reward excellence and talent in drawing practice across Wales. It also serves as a tribute to the support Kyffin Williams gave to aspiring artists and the value he placed on drawing skills throughout his career.”
Whilst mulling this phrase over, together with the image of the map of Anglesey, I was reminded of the late Paul Davies, the sculptor tutor on the Art Foundation Course I attended at Coleg Menai in the 80s. During sessions in his classes we occasionally caught sight of Paul working on his Mappa Mundi series of works, which he produced based on the map of Wales and made out of mixed media and found objects (I think).
It was whilst googling Paul’s name last year that I first encountered the story of his ‘Welsh Not’ protest at the 1977 Eisteddfod and the incredibly iconic photo that captures it so vividly, in which Paul is seen in almost crucifixion-like pose.
What made the image even more pertinent to me is that during my brief time studying under Paul, he encouraged (and actively helped) me to produce a life-sized Christ figure out of old car exhaust pipes which carried a huge wooden railway sleeper across its shoulders. Looking back, the finished piece must have had real resonance for Paul of which I certainly wasn’t aware at the time. (As a side note, I believe that the exhaust pipe sculpture ended up in the garden of an old people’s home, where it must have frightened the living daylights out of the residents!)
Having discovered Paul’s political activism and his founding of the Beca group of artists in response to the lack of support for the Welsh arts at that time, I read about the post-colonial work of Iwan Bala (such as Cymru Ewropa and Mapostan) which led me onto the work by Joaquim Torres-García, in one of which he presented an upturned map of South America.
Given the highly charged political events currently under way, and a recent attempt to restrict the use of Welsh in the workplace, I felt it wasn’t too unreasonable to use this piece to point out that ideas of nationhood and culture are being turned on their head.
Paul Davies later carved his WN sleeper into a Welsh Love Spoon, hence its inclusion in This Be The Verse.
The series of three drawings is intended to pay homage to the life of Sir Kyffin Williams in this, the centenary of his birth, and they were inspired by reading numerous articles, writings and speeches by and about him. Any historical or interpretive inaccuracies are entirely my own!
The full list of drawings submitted to the competition is as follows:
The Kyffin Williams Drawing Prize “was founded in 2009 by the Kyffin Williams Trust and Oriel Môn; and works in partnership with the National Museum Wales, Cardiff and the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. The competition – which is held every three years – aims to promote and reward excellence and talent in drawing practice across Wales. It also serves as a tribute to the support Kyffin Williams gave to aspiring artists and the value he placed on drawing skills throughout his career.”
This Be The Verse (Pen & Ink & Gesso on Canvas Board 60cm x 60cm)
This was the first of my three submissions to the Kyffin Williams Drawing Prize to be held at the Oriel (although this one wasn’t accepted).
This piece is named after a famous poem by Philip Larkin (contains rude word) and is intended to hint at the difficult relationship Sir Kyffin had with his mother, as she herself did with her father before.
It also attempts to draw parallels with the ‘relationship’ between Wales and England, and was inspired in part by learning about the Welsh Not punishment meted out in some schools in order to dissuade children from speaking Welsh. From my limited reading on the subject, it seems that, although this was never official policy, it would not have been successful without the support of families. Certainly, it seems that Sir Kyffin was banned by his mother from speaking Welsh in the house; something which he regarded as ‘brainwashing‘.
The Welsh Love Spoon held by the mother figure has relevance to the next piece!
The series of three drawings is intended to pay homage to the life of Sir Kyffin Williams in this, the centenary of his birth, and they were inspired by reading numerous articles, writings and speeches by and about him. Any historical or interpretive inaccuracies are entirely my own!
The Kyffin Williams Drawing Prize “was founded in 2009 by the Kyffin Williams Trust and Oriel Môn; and works in partnership with the National Museum Wales, Cardiff and the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth. The competition – which is held every three years – aims to promote and reward excellence and talent in drawing practice across Wales. It also serves as a tribute to the support Kyffin Williams gave to aspiring artists and the value he placed on drawing skills throughout his career.”
This is a painting of a seated male nude, which was developed from a study produced during a life drawing class from 2015.
It’s part of a continuing series in which I’m investigating how far it’s possible to push the use of flat colour and interlocking shapes to represent the planes of the human figure in space whilst balancing figuration and abstraction.
Whilst painting it I was thinking of the work of the American Pop Artist, Tom Wesselmann.
I’ve included the original life drawing sketch on which it was based below, just in case it’s of interest.
