'City of Glass 31- (A Study in Violet)'

'City of Glass 31 - (A Study in Violet)'    180x100cms

 

A reference/homage to 'A Study in Scarlet', the first Sherlock Holmes story - after all,  'City of Glass'* is a detective novel. The painting was originally worked as two canvases side by side, and planned as a much larger version of 'Celestial' with a less sweet blue/black sky. I had great problems dealing with the scale, lots of bitty areas, confusion.  After separation,  the colour-scheme was pared down,  the composition strengthened with the introduction of the violet/black stripe, an extended Central Park.  There are obvious connections with 'City of Glass 29- (The Space Between' and intriguing ambiguities. Is the violet stripe a sinister tower? A violet void - the entrance to the alley where 'detective' Quinn obsessively watches the entrance to the Stillman apartment? Love the play with the violet-black curves of Riverside Drive and the horizontal of 42nd St - in my eyes, the painting is exquisitely balanced. Perhaps because of the scale, the paint is less all-over heavy, with staining and transparent layerings bringing  areas of light to the piece.  

 

 

The main idea for my (unsuccessful) applications to the Pollack Krasner Foundation, Triangle Arts Association & the Tate St.Ives Residency, was to make a suite of paintings, each containing one of the letters that spell T.H.E.T.O.W.E.R.O.F.B.A.B.E.L. Maybe this is the first painting in that series within a series....(L).  Might need some funding though - these are substantial canvases! The concept still excites me, it is a piece I have to make, somehow, sometime. Because the 15 paintings will be arranged/hung with the greatest visual coherence, the letters will inevitably be all jumbled up, forcing the viewer, like Quinn, to discover the letters that spell T.H.E.T.O.W.E.R.O.F.B.A.B.E.L.

 

 

 

 

 

I am working in The Shire Hall Gallery at the Bodmin Visitors Centre for Open Studios, once again sharing a fantastic space with Janie M McDonald.  We are also both exhibiting a large selection of our work. Come see - we are there until 12 June.

 

 



 

 

 *from 'The New York Trilogy', a novel by Paul Auster

 

 

'City of Glass 21 - (Nowhere)'



'City of Glass 21- (Nowhere)'      160x100cms

'By wandering aimlessly, all places became equal and it no longer mattered where he was. On his best walks, he was able to feel that he was nowhere. And this, finally, was all he ever asked of things: to be nowhere. New York was the nowhere he had built around himself, and he realised that he had no intention of ever leaving it again' 

The words of author/detective Daniel Quinn....*

Exploring blacks again- a rectangle of true/tube black in the bottom left corner- how to use colour to make it work...thoughts of Richard Diebenkorn's black/orange 'Ocean Park 133' and a black/orange Mark Surridge painting at his recent show at the Millenium Gallery...Manhattan fragmented, open, anonymous, nowhere, subjugated to the painting....

'Ocean Park 133'

It's Open Studios again at the Shire Hall Gallery in Bodmin, a fabulous space I'm sharing with Janie M McDonald. The dialogue has already begun.. Janie's loathing of the salmon pink led to the red found with an Alizarin glaze...I spent 3 hrs repainting the central green vertical with the difficult aim of getting a line with presence, a line that was straight but not perfect.....Denise saw the outline of a figure in the curves of the eastern shore...Quinn? Stillman?...the pursuer or the pursued?

Black is 'nowhere'

detail- COG 21

* P:4, 'The New York Trilogy' by Paul Auster