FRI 20 MARCH p.m.
The finale was blue, with the final, final mark the blue roof on the left balancing the blue brushstroke on the right edge. The red centre dominates, framed by piers, tempered by the pulsating hot pink below. We have a painting!
(4) Colour that grips the eyes
'The legacy of colour, the interaction of colour, the emotion of colour...'
(3) Nearly...
FRI 20 MARCH a.m.
The breakthrough came today by turning the canvas round and discarding the literalness of the drawings (4). The central section became the harbour, with its three distinct basins and the row of rooftops, hanging like washing from the long curve. The magenta brushmarks in the 'sky' nearly worked, creating depth but they seemed disconnected, floating. I should have used two different sized brushes.
(2)
I initially worked from drawings of Porthleven's finest view - the panorama from the bench at the top of Institute Hill (1) - an inspiration for generations of artists, including Wilhemina Barnes-Graham and Jeremy Gardiner. The painting began last year on the Nicholas de Stael workshop, hence the proliferation of block shapes and a similar josting between abstraction and figuration. A different start but of course I have to find my own language and painting - if De Stael's signature is the block, mine is the pour! Liquid oil-paint flooded the bottom half with colour, orange then blue (2) but things became too literal. The excitement was always the green lines across the earthy red - Venetian Red with a touch of Vermillion.
(1)
As I'm painting rooftops, I thought I'd include these two fabulous paintings that show De Stael's seemless transition from abstraction to to figuration: 'Composition', 1951 (left) and 'Roofs, Paris' 1952 (right). Something I took from De Stael was the simplicity of his late drawings, often made with a felt-tip pen, which create delicious ambiguities between positive and negative spaces, which i explore in my paintings.
