Category Archives: Fossil

Second new painting of 2020

 

Second painting finished this year. So today was great fun. Built a crate for two paintings….finished another painting – this one…..and had a short bike ride…..
So this one I am going to have some fun with the naming. I have not quite got the wording right yet so this will take a few days of thought
Being somewhat enigmatic the painting resides in several genre’s it has aspects of the mythological and the factual, historical and literative influences abound and goes back and forth between them all quite resolutely at home in all the places it can be said to exist separately in each and at the same time concurently in all, and all at the same time….
for the moment then it is 90×180 cm oil on canvas
Such is the power of art…..to not just transcend boundaries, but fundamentally to make them illusiory delusional and completely irrelevant….
Well have fun working that out

 

 

 

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……

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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

Fossil part 2

…..The painting continues….just as the light begins to fade, but it is a nice even light to work with….so another layer….another step along the way….

Fossil

…..something that may seem a bit different, though it may not. Some may remember I was given by a dog, well that is to say the dog dropped it by my feet probably expecting a game of fetch…..a flipper, such an interesting thing in itself. I kept it. It was all bones and skin, the bones still held together. This was last August and it’s just sort of been there in view as I am painting…..not really knowing what to do with it. Far to interesting to throw away. For a while it never even occurred to me to try and identify it, well a few weeks ago I did and it kind of hit home, another creature gone. The flipper belonged….is that that the right word, or perhaps part of would be better…..I have to be a bit careful here as I could easily get side tracked into a discourse on Fuzzy logic, re Bart Kosko….it’s an interesting read. Lets just say it is, to the best of my ability to identify it…. the flipper of a bottle nosed dolphin. What ever happened to the creature I will never know. But having that knowledge made me want to do….something with it. Commemorate it’s life or just to acknowledge something about this wonderful species. So I am going to, have in fact begun to…… include it into a painting.
Firstly the canvas has been stretched and primed. It is a 30×60 inch piece. the next thing was to embed the flipper into the canvas and I did this by first cutting into the canvas and using small strips of canvas to make a hollow area that the flipper could be placed in. I then made up a mixture of micro crystaline wax and genuine turpentine heated until thoroughly mixed and after placing the flipper into the hollow I then poured the liquid around then flipper…..
In an excited sense…. for me that is… I understood from the outset of the idea that this is akin to fossilizing the flipper, it reminded me of the ghostly fossils Aaron and I found embedded in limestone on the shores of the dingle peninsula when we cycle toured Ireland in 2017. So then the painting has started today with staining the canvas…..It will go through many changes and excitedly I have to idea what those changes will be. I’ll be doing a blog about this on my website…..but here are the first two images……
Detail
A new piece begins