The final version with indistinct cast shadows added (the sun was in clouds at the time). Thanks for the feedback Vivienne.
In this oil painting I worked entirely from preliminary sketches in pencil and inktense water paint. The point was really to collect enough information in the sketch, especially on background and accessory objects that might otherwise be overlooked. Another thought, from the early chapters of Hockney’s “History of Pictures“, is to actively work from the edges in painting, not just the supposed central focus of the image.
I sketched sitting in the garden. The focus is obviously the blue pot and pattern of the paving. However, I tried to bracket the composition with the small concrete garden ornaments of the boy on a fish, and the squirrel. I wanted to include the play items behind the lawn, and the clothes drier.
I passed a significant anniversary in February to March. One year ago I spent 25 days in hospital having a near lethal dose of chemotherapy, rescued by my own, previously harvested, blood stem cells. I became very ill and rehabilitation after was prolonged. I returned to the haematology department recently for my last psychology appointment. This hospital is also my place of work. By chance, on the exact anniversary of my discharge home, I stood again in what had been my room a year before.
During my chemotherapy and immediate follow up, I had driven or been driven to my appointments. Now I go to work or appointments by train, but this is a time of reminiscence, even so. One year on, these journeys have take on a personal meaning. I painted the journey, fellow travellers at the station, the interlude between stations at Waterstones cafe, the memory of the uncanniness and visual distortion from when I was exhausted, facing the prospect of scaling the short shallow incline of the hospital drive to the haematology building at the top. The paintings were drawn from sketches I made on the journey.
In this painting, I had some ideas from the work of Peter Doig in the House of Music show at the Serpentine and other paintings of his I had looked at online (for example the rectangular blocks with figures and regular masonry blocks of House of Flowers (see you there). As in some of Doig’s work, I allowed myself to give expressionistic outlines to the figures. Part of this narrative for me was that as I drew the pencil sketch, I attracted interest from the stranger sitting nearby. She turned out to be a PhD student studying mathematical modelling in health care scenarios and is also a spare time painter.
This painting was done in a couple of hours, then the left side was repainted a week or two later. I painted on a white ground in drawn strokes with round brushes, making blocks of colour but without using a flat brush. I redrew elements on the left after the first layer was dry. The distortions of scale were deliberate, combining observation with the fantastical, reflecting that exhausting climb up the small incline to the small Haematology building at the top.
Station and trains sketchesand first layers in paint
Cafe sketches and first paint layers
Waterstones cafe pencil sketch on site, with written notes on colour.
This self portrait took its shape from the textured ground. I like it a lot. Interestingly, my son interpreted the distortions as relating to my treatment for lymphoma last year. But this is how I feel, and it’s not a bad thing.
This was oil paper, primed with gesso and painted some time ago with palette dregs diluted I think with solvent free medium and applied with a plastic card to give a textures surface. Oil paint was then applied neat. I’m not sure how well it will adhere once dry. The palette was limited, mainly ultramarine, burnt umber, burnt sienna in mixes or tints with zinc white with some permanent rose and Indian yellow in places. I took the shapes from those formed by the dried ground.
The ground was A4 paper coated with gesso and painted some months ago with surplus oil paint. The sketch as made in oxide of chromium tints, the background made of ultramarine, Indian yellow and zinc white, the face shaped in tints of Indian yellow and permanent rose, using the underlying green sketch to mute these colours.
One year ago today I left hospital in a wheel chair after a three and a half weeks stay having high dose chemotherapy and an autograft, followed by the inevitable toxicity, sepsis and deconditioning. I find it amazing to remember how ill I was, and how good it feels to have recovered. I was reminded of this when, doing my own ward round today, I stood outside the door of the very side room where I had been isolated.
In the weeks that followed I kept my skills alive through Draw Brighton’s portrait club. I’ve already posted my own sketches as I did them but here are a series of others’ drawings of me, accidentally showing my hair growing back.
it’s sometimes hard to get the names right of your fellow artists in these sessions.
This collage was done on paper cut from a carrier bag. The photographs were all taken quickly on a walk with the dog. The human figures were chance inclusions in wider images, that I then resized on the computer. The sunlight on the wood panel floor of the book shop was imposed into this park composition, giving a sense of light and of perspective. The man with a delivery on a trolley was deliberately placed in the final composition so his size was diminished in comparison with the advancing runners, rather than the more representative approach in the initial placings.
A few days later, I had a palette of surplus paint, oxide of chromium green, Indian yellow, cadmium red, zinc white, cerulean and ultramarine blues, all wet with Gamblin solvent fee medium. The original run-in-the-park collage had elements of perspective built in, so I worked with this, reserving some of the lighter toned collage pieces, applying paint with a plastic rectangle angled to create the illusion of receding flat space, partly a surface, partly submerging the runner.
This collage was made on an old bit of foamboard that had been used as a support for paper being treated with ink and bleach, and some of this seeped through. I am not sure where the straight lines came from, but anyway these started the idea of the box … the black box with the quantum trigger, in which is utterly concealed a cat simultaneously in a state of life and death until the box is opened, then the probability cloud collapses into one reality.
I thought about the play on words, a cat or CAT (computer assisted tomography) scan which uses a program to rebuild detailed X-ray data from a donut shaped scanner into serial slices through the body called tomograms. I also thought about cats being a kind of pet. PET (positron emission tomography) scans build CAT images with X-rays overlaid with anatomical data generated by triangulating the perpendicular linear radiation from an injected radiolabelled sugar that is selectively taken up in areas of high metabolism, including normal organs such as liver and brain but also malignant deposits.
The analogy with the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment is this. After CAT or PET information is reconstituted as images, the scans must be interpreted, the result sent to a clinician, and the interpretation communicated to the patient on an appointed day. This represents the black box: time from scan to revelation. The patient is the cat, simultaneously in state of remission and relapse. Only when the result is told does the probability matrix collapse into one reality.
Last month, I had a PET scan. Between scan and result I imagined myself in that quantum state and thought about how to realise it in a piece of art.
However, before I could execute this work, the clinician, who by chance is also my line manager at work, emailed me the pdf of the report with the brief message “Great result. Keep up the good work”. I was indeed working that day so did not open the pdf until the evening with my wife, The email message had already begun to shift the probability cloud toward remission, so the box had been opened slightly for a peek, and this was confirmed on reading the report. The probability matrix has collapsed: I am in remission, at least for now.
One effect was that I could not undertake this art work in the state of uncertainty as planned, and this is merely a retrospective on that memory. The box is opened and from the quantum cloud the confined cat emerges very much alive and somewhat pissed off.
I covered the foamboard with non opaque gesso to give it tooth and inked again the blacks to get greater contrast. I used mainly photographs taken as references for painting exercises, particularly of woodland, and of decaying sunflowers.
The collage was made in response to the photograph below from a fellow student, photographer Louise Alderman. I responded to this monochrome image of cut and sawn posts standing up in littoral waves, with a collage in colour (mainly blue and orange) focussed on reflections extending downwards on still water of growing trees.
This oil painting was done in twenty minutes before I started the collage and took the same theme. I used the left over paint from yesterday’s portrait applied and scraped off and moved around with a plastic card on a heavily gesso’d piece of oil paint paper.
I wasn’t sure what I might gain from an “introduction to painting” workshop, organised through Open College of the Arts Students’ Association and led by Lydia Merrett, which was aimed more at design, illustration and textile students who don’t already paint (I am doing the OCA Foundation in Painting course). Still, I put it on in the background but then got seduced, and made some paintings. The session included the tricks of timed painting, down to 15 seconds, use of non-dominant hand, painting from memory, and particularly use of implements other than brushes. Here are a few of my pieces from the session.
Two rashers of bacon and a fried egg on a bagel from memory. Paper clip and wooden peg over a couple of minutes I think.
Left handed pointing, broad brush, stick and wire.
Five minute sketch, brush and paper clip.
Two minutes, and 30 seconds, brush and paper clip.
kestrelart 