about my methods
In my real-world photo-works I have produced long thin horizontal images, either alone or grouped together, and long vertical assemblies all made from several thin slivers of photographs. Here I wanted to restrict the normal fields of view to cut down legibility to a certain extent and to hopefully produce a curiosity in the viewer who would need to read and locate the connection of separate elements in the elongated frames.
I feel this strategy is aided and abetted by techniques I have developed in image manipulation to decrease the focus of the much-saturated colour elements in each set-up and to superimpose and balance the very sharp black and white components over them. I have not altered the hues in the colours of each shot - all the shades were there in nature when the camera recorded them.
The Image below taken from my vertical photo-work Apercale Street Lighting illustrates well the throwing of focus in different areas of varying contrast within the images. I feel these effects help defamiliarise our usual perceptions of visual reality and this is why my work really needs to be seen very close-to.
In my paint-works and their related photo manifestations I feel that close-up viewing is very important as well.
One of my main strategies has been to try and paint without brushes by pipetting water on top of blobs of the twelve different colours I chose to use.
I have elegantly organised the circle of colours I employ in an analogous way to the circle of fifths - the foundation of the tonal system in music. There are twelve notes in the musical octave and twelve colours in my visual one. My colours are often arranged in orders that emphasise their complementary nature (as in tritones in music) i.e. the way that green is the opposite discordant colour to red and so on. Thus when lines are joined between the water-covered paint blobs encouraging flows of pigment between them.
I like to think that the colours run like music moves, creating new harmonies in time. Further on other shades mingle and I guide the, sometimes fanciful, images with a small spatula. Afterwards one can constantly see new forms, encouraged by the light of a single daylight bulb, to re-form into new motives, especially when the pictures rotate.
I was somewhat influence in this work by the Second Viennese school of serial composers - particularly Anton Webern. Whether the pictures show this, I am not so sure, but it got me going.
Below is a section of Teeming Toccata
There is still a long way to go with these approaches I have chosen.
See Work in Progress to view new projects emerging.
archive of some of my earlier images that perhaps anticipate my present work
This section needs to be read as a therapeutic tour of self-justification where I am trying to make sense about what I have achieved during my creative life over many years and decades. The following are a few pictures from many and I have hopefully learned a few things from assembling this compilation.
I made the pencil drawing below in the late-1960s. It's a panoramic collage of bits of my home town Burslem in Stoke-on-Trent. The town hall clock with it's angel on top, beloved of Arnold Bennett, appears several times. I feel I captured the grim nature of this dying town. although much less smoky today, the place is still has depressing atmosphere having had most of its industrial heart ripped out of it.
Here is another collage of the same town. I drew these before I had any art training and am pleased to see the confidence of simple line that my drawing had at that distant time.
This set of house pictures are from my time at the London College of Printing in 1970. Originally they were presented in strip book form and later arranged them above each other and framed them. I was living in Acton at the time and these were houses of different styles and decoration that I passed every day. I was exploring different drawing styles as can be seen.
A drawing from a series of the old village of Brown Edge in the moors north of Stoke from about the same time as the above. Again I was using crayon a lot but here some of the images are more abstracted. I also notice the beginning of my obsession with power lines which often run through my photo-works.
It was my ambition in the early 70s to be an illustrator. I soon abandoned Alan Aldridge style characters with big noses and tried to tell the story in pictures that mirrored the plot with fragmented images. This is the last one of a series for the Grimm's story Bearskin
Two pictures - studies for a projected record sleeve for Igor Stravinsky's ballet Petrushka. The portraits are of the composer at different ages. If only I could make pictures the same way he wrote music! He was my first musical hero.
The study below it portrays Vaslav Nijinsky in the title roll of the doomed puppet that comes alive in the original production in 1911
Perhaps a more conventional image of the time as a study for a another Grimm's tale - the wood as a loop. It took me a long time to get out of the woods with my picture-making and is taking a long time to deal with long thin images.
Below it is a study for Rapunzel - a sort of 3D image of an elongated stage-set from the side
I planned a design for a book cover for Graham Greene's novel 'The Comedians'. I prefer the studies below to my final projected design.
During my time at the Royal College of Art when I was becoming an experimental film-maker and working with other like-minds I did not do a lot of drawing but I was experiencing at very close quarters many images repeated in very long lengths. In my film-making I tried to work in very structured visual spaces and produced an epic production on TV studio video about the death of Mozart which was structured like a huge piano concerto, formally.
After college I filled many sketch books and note books with projects and scribbles and got into situations where I couldn't finish anything and made endless plans. I also worked in independent films as editor, sound-recordist and sound editor when my two children were young.
In the early 80s we moved to Norfolk and I wrote several musical plays for the community and I was drawing again.
The one below was done whilst I was in London, imagining a field surrounded by trees. I wanted to work towards a field painting (American art joke) but I was still scared of paint.
Then in 1990 I bit the bullet and started to use paint - not very thickly in this first one of imaginary trees.
Now an imaginary wood with thick paint!
Then my manipulation of acrylic paint became a little more advanced with this picture of Buttermere. You will recognise it of course if you have been there - well, perhaps not. I was making paint float and I imagined the super-imposed surrounding hills standing in some aquarium perhaps.
Here I made a drawing outdoors near Haddiscoe in Norfolk in the mid 80s - the same place I would shoot recently for a photographic work Haddiscoe Tree Tutti. I was pleased at the time how I had varied my mark-making to produce much variety of texture and 'colour'.
After making a local film project which was very ambitious and after working on several film scripts I decided to write a comic novel to try and help with family income - some hope as it turned out. Never mind it was great being god for quite a few years and inventing crazy worlds. Some people seemed to like some of the three that ended up in print. Perhaps I could sell some prints of the covers I enjoyed designing. They make another of my elongated images when aligned together.
After writing the books I spent ages tittivating them and wrote drafts of a few sitcom versions of some of the short stories in the last book on the right which is a series about a London portrait painter - a sort of English Frazier type thing. What modest ambitions I have had!
After all the words I had been writing it was good to start drawing again. I had this idea of relating black and white pencil drawings to some ideas about piano playing. The piano is a very black and white instrument with severe limitations of parameters to adjust to vary tone colours but despite this one hears some amazing pianists producing such wonderful tonal variety with minimal means. I though can one do that with black and white drawings? I remember a leading newspaper typographer gave us a talk at the London College of Printing and produce a front page of the Daily Express of the time (early 1970's - well before colour newspapers). He drew our attention to the colour value of all the varied fonts used in all the articles. The page looked so attractive despite some of its content. Anyway, I resolved to try and make my drawing as colourful as possible without actual colour.
Below is a picture of Bunster Hill and Thorpe Cloud at the entry to Dovedale. My energetic lines try to show relief, texture and a riot of summer foliage. I vividly remember running straight to the top of Thorpe Cloud in the mid Fifties. Here I was running with my pencils in 2007.
Gozo impressed me with its open spaces compared to the conurbation that is most of its senior neighbour the island of Malta
Back to Derbyshire and two seething sections of Millers Dale with its rock faces.
Below are two virtuoso, dare one say, imaginary studies of trees. The first one makes me think I should design bank notes, the other is a forest of counterpoint and dense harmony.
this imaginary tree composition is much less dense and I see it is a a sort of fugue of complex polyphony.
Here is a drawing made in 2012 of Bunster Hill and Thorpe Cloud again which goes as far as one can in in this vein, being totally manic.
Finally, here is a banana which is long and thin like a lot of my images. I was trying to show the different textures of the skin and flesh and the ripeness of the bitten-off stump. However, please note that it is not a Euro banana which would be straight but a true curved limp Brexit job. It's part of our brilliant new future!!
