FRI 12 JUNE
At long last, a homage to both Matisse's 'The Red Studio' (1911) and Peter Lanyon's 'Porthleven' (1952) in the same painting - undoubtedly the two most influential paintings on my journey as an artist. The studio is the Old Lifeboat House in Porthleven, where many of the works in the series were made, and is painted in Venetian Red, the key red in Matisse's 'Red Studio'.
I have tried several times before to have a 'Red Studio' in a Porthleven painting but without success. Here, there is a rightness about the presence of the studio, how and where it sits in the painting, bringing control, precision and context, serenity amongst the movement, a visual stop, preventing the eye from sliding out of the painting in the bottom-right corner. I like the 'pose' of the harbour.
Speedy blues across the reds squeeze and frame the harbour. These are some of my best reds. I'm enjoying the procession of curves in the three sections of the harbour and the colour surprise of rarely used Ultramarine and hot greens as foils for the reds. It's also a rare 'viewpoint', from the Ship Inn side of the harbour. The painting of 2009 (1) gave me a composition and a palette and a startpoint. The painting now fits my ideal: a visual simplicity that is also a complexity, a conclusion of experience, exploration and imagination. We're done.
The painting, incredibly, began in 2009, during a Residency at Canford School (1) but I was never convinced by the drawing or the orientation, or never fixed it. The painting was lively but sketchy and raw: my paintings rarely survive the first stages.
