Fossil…..an update (part four)

Lot’s and lot’s of play with this and rather than lot’s of writing here are some images, I am not showing every single stage with this….just those moments during the process, when a pause occurs, or when something interesting happens to change the focus or is revealing in some way. Usually it is a visual thing not easily put into words…..so most recent is last……

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

New painting

Sol and the crescent Moon – 400 times larger, 400 times further away. Oil on canvas 30×60 inches

 

Sol and the crescent Moon – 400 times larger, 400 times further away. Oil on canvas 30×60 inches £2500

24th March 2020

Lockdown-ish day 1…..the morning has almost gone, and I have been as always painting, just outside the front door is a sheltered veranda with a glass roof where I set up two tables for all the stuff I use. No one about. Usually there is always some background noise….some thing… some annoying engine, ship engines, aircraft engines, tractor engines….lot’s of aircraft…cars always bloody cars….and on an Island I can cycle round in 20 minutes…..it is ridiculous.
But today is different, I remember when air traffic was shut down during Iceland’s volcanic eruptions….at first it took a while to notice that there were for a short time no aircraft vapor trails scaring the sky, once I had noticed I just could not stop looking at that sky…..it was quite wonderful…..actually it was sublime.
…And today in beautiful sunshine spending the whole morning painting not a cloud in the sky….and the only sounds I hear are the sounds of nature. The bird song is utterly sublime…it echoes from place to place….it is wonderful. I cannot describe how wonderful it is to simply only hear nature……without that constant and incessant background noise……I hate that noise…..we cannot…must not go back to how things were, it is simply wrong…..

Fossil part three

…..some canvas staining still to be done, but adding a little more linseed oil into the mix now and more paint too, the beginnings of some texture, and a wee bit more of the liquid (again heated gently until it melts) micocrystaline wax and genuine turpentine, and again once poured it quickly solidifies…..so in all three more sessions on this piece and I am already two weeks into this.

Not constant painterly activity…..stillness and looking, contemplating and some art historical, mythological, and science research also goes on along the way. Looking for all sorts of connections to feed into the work. For instance at the moment I am reading ‘The Ancestors Tale’ by Richard Dawkins, and oddly enough I am at that point in the book that discuses our concestor with cetaceans…..including dolphins.

Not surprisingly I am looking at J.M.W. Turner’s ‘Sunrise with sea monsters’ 1845. interpretations of the painting are varied……The Tate Gallery maintains  that the “monsters” are just fish, I however think that if you take Turner’s life his personal history – his mother’s tragic life, the lose of his sister and put this into the context of the times in which he lived…..the friends he had like Walter Faulks, who campaigned to end slavery, and in that context most profoundly Turners ‘Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying, Typhoon coming on’ also ‘A Shipwreck at Sea’ and most of his work, then you have to accept that there is always going to be a deeper meaning to any one of his paintings….and then it is quite obvious that the Tate’s interpretation is at best simplistic and naive, and in fact all his works have an edge to them. The painting was done towards the end of his life and most think the painting is unfinished. For me it is as finished as it needs to be

Yesterday (16th March 2020)

This morning 17th March 2020

This evening 17th March 2020