Peter Jon Fowler

Painter

Midsummer

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Now is the summer of our rich content, not only in the middle of the year but in the middle of the Aldeburgh Festival e.g. have just come in from marvellous concert of chamber music in the beautiful Blythburgh church which was, of course, packed. Yesterday, similar fare was created in Aldeburgh church – which was, of course also packed. And it was the same last weekend when a concert in the concert hall at Snape Maltings, which seats over 800, was also packed out. My theory is that the large and largely elderly audience which turns out, apparently from nowhere, for any occasion provided by Aldeburgh Music lives in rather well-appointed burrows somewhere in a remote part of mid-Suffolk and is ethereally magicked into ‘Britten country’ as the occasion requires.

 

This note, however, is really to record that on the 19th I sent out a bulk e-mailing to some 200 addresses informing recipients that I now have a web page. About 30 messages came back as undeliverable for one reason or another, which is, I suppose, not bad for a list which has accumulated over several years and never been consciously ‘managed’. Anyway, now that I have theoretically broadened the range of potential viewers, I shall start changing images in The Gallery again, beginning towards the end of this coming week.

 

Meanwhile, I have run into stiff challenges in trying to finish ‘Becker Country’ and ‘Sizewell A and B’, the two big pictures on my easels at the moment. I have sought ideas to get round the blockages by revisiting Sizewell yesterday, after one concert, and driving round ‘Becker country’ today after the concert. Sizewell was doing what it does so well: a cold wind blowing off the North Sea across the dunes and as many as a dozen fishing boats drawn up in ordered disarray upon the shingle beach. Plenty of images and ideas there – I took over 100 photographs! Today I visited Old Hall Farm near Wenhaston where the Becker family lived for a time – it has helped to see, if only from the outside, the two fine brick buildings – a hall and a farm building of c1600?? – which provided Becker with his everyday surroundings early in the 20th century.

Aldeburgh Festival art exhibitions

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Yesterday was my birthday and, by chance almost, it took in three art exhibitions, two directly part of Aldeburgh Music’s Festival and the other in a commercial gallery in Aldeburgh timed to coincide with the Festival.

The principal exhibition is in the Peter Pears Gallery, Aldeburgh: ‘John Craske: Threads’. I was unfamiliar with this artist’s work, and was not apparently alone. ‘Not much is known about the Norfolk fisherman, painter, embroiderer and chronic invalid, John Craske … ‘, writes Julia Blackburn in the Festival Catalogue at the start of her essay on Craske (pp. 200-05). To my eyes, the assemblage on display ranges from the dismal to the exceptionally good, his subject (ships, fishermen and the sea) and his naive style unmistakably reminding me of the contemporary St Ives artist, Alfred Wallis. Some of Craske’s sea-scenes, of little boats and big seas in particular, were sufficiently vivid as to make it feel as if the Gallery floor was heaving. Though I sympathise with his plight which ultimately drove him to stop painting and do embroidery in bed instead, I found myself unsympathetic to his embroidery as art.

The other two exhibitions were of Richard Bawden and Matt Collishaw. I might have a word about the latter in looking at the whole of the art display on site at the Maltings, Snape; but of the former all one need say is that the exhibition was exactly what you would expect of a Richard Bawden exhibition: thoroughly enjoyable if you like his sort of art, but there is not much variety or subtlety to fall back on if you don’t. I bought a Winchcombe pottery candle-holder.

‘Cooking’ ‘Becker Country’

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Gardening a.m. and painting p.m. make an excellent pair: my herbs are in a much better state than a week ago and painting is progressing well too. ‘Sizewell A and B’ are now in position, the AEA will doubtless be relieved to know; the roughly 1 m sq ‘Becker Country’ may indeed be finished: it is now ‘cooking’.

‘Cooking’ in my painting parlance describes that phase in a painting’s evolution when it may be finished and is now just sitting there being looked at every day until the moment when, walking into the studio, one either knows for certain that it is finished or, more usually, sees that it isn’t but, with a bit of luck, knows what to do to move it forward. The title is lifted from David Thompson’s essay ‘Becker’, the Suffolk artist in his book of the same title (The Wildlife Art Gallery, Lavenham. 2002, p. 32): “There are a few square miles of coastal East Anglia which could well be called ‘Becker Country’. ” Though not very well-known, even in East Anglia, Harry Becker (1865-1928) was a gifted draughtsman and brilliant painter who created works melding acute and sympathetic observation with a vigorous, impressionistic style. He settled in and around Halesworth in east Suffolk and, either side of the First World War, drew and painted the ordinary in the daily lives of the local farm-workers, their families and their countryside. The world he depicted, indeed illuminated, the world of unremitting manual labour on the land, the world of horses as rural power-source, was highly unfashionable artistically but it is of course a world which has now totally disappeared. Becker is therefore of historical as well as artistic importance, an aspect of his work not fully explored in the Thompson book. He unknowingly anticipated the oral record of that horse-based world made a few miles down the road at Blaxhall a couple of decades later by George Ewart Evans.

Growing awareness of Becker’s significance in recent years has now been formalised in what is in effect an appreciation Society, Inspired by Becker (IBBS). One of its functions is to organise an annual exhibition, not of Becker’s work but of contemporary work inspired by his oeuvre. This year is the third such exhibition and, along with many other mainly local artists – and there’s a lot of artistic talent in East Suffolk! – I have been invited to submit up to three works. ‘Becker Country’ is one of them; the other two, much smaller, have also been painted specially for this occasion. One of them, ‘Quails’ eggs 1: crushed’, is exhibited in The Gallery, the first example on this web-page of a painting going straight from easel to Gallery. One merit of this e-medium is that I don’t have to wait for the painting to dry before it can be exhibited.

This note reminds me that I have not yet written anything about exhibiting: another story for another day.

 

Filed Under: Art

Done paintings

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Despite interruptions for really serious matters such as Test Match days at Lord’s (non-cricketing readers can ignore that clause), I’ve continued painting and not blogging during the second half of May, recognising that I’ve been lucky enough to hit a ‘purple patch’ when ideas flow from the head and images flow from the brush (well, palette knife actually, since I don’t often use a brush), and all I want to do is paint. I know that one is supposed to knuckle down and put in a disciplined artistic stint each day, and I’ve no doubt I would benefit from such a regime, but in practice I don’t work that way. I know other artists, whatever their regime, also blow hot and cold, have good periods, uninspired phases, and I accept that one has to plug on whether on song or not; but it is nevertheless a great feeling when the muse visits, and even better when you can look back at the results of such a visitation and see that they are not at all bad.

Now I have the pleasure and the challenge of two big ‘canvases’ to work on during June – ‘big’ by my standards is a metre square or thereabouts. One is a new painting envisaged as ‘Becker country’, of which more anon, being created on the surface of heavy plywood formerly bearing ‘Ard-scene’ (see The Gallery) which I found to be damaged beyond repair when I hauled it out of storage; the other is a complete re-working of what I thought was a completed painting of a landscape with megaliths. The megaliths have to go! – watch this space, more specifically the spaces where they were. They are to be replaced by Sizewell A and B, nuclear power stations on the Suffolk coast. Who knows whether this is not a like-for-like replacement?

If there is another gap before I blog again, I’m painting – please do not disturb!

 

 

Done painting week

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Am going to stop there for the moment: have done 7 continuous days’ painting, finished 7 paintings with one big one to finish off with some detail. One, ‘Quails’ eggs 1′, is the latest entry into The Gallery, and two others are quite good, I think. But the real world now intrudes, I have to deal with other things, and I’m not going to get back to the easels for another week or more.

‘Suffolk church’ drops out of Gallery

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The former presence of each ‘disappeared image’ will be recorded in Insight by reproducing here the identifier of and textual entry for each image as previously published in The Gallery.

The 18th image, ‘Quails’ eggs 1′, replaced the second image which was:

“1/10 Suffolk church         Oil on handmade paper

This illustrates a generalised Suffolk church, not a particular one; though, as anyone who has visited churches in east Suffolk in particular will recognise, examples such as those at Blythburgh, Saxmundham, Friston, the Ilketshalls and Theberton are all echoed in one or more ways by this image. Medieval churches here, for example, are characteristically of western tower, un-aisled nave and small chancel, on a knoll over-looking water; much of the coastal landscape was, and sometimes still is, typically heathland as the image suggests.

1/10 Suffolk church

The image itself was created consciously in an early-nineteenth century style, mimicking the many images of features such as churches produced at a time when antiquarian recording was giving way to early tourist publication. The media used were something of an experiment for this painter at the time (January 2010).”

Quails’ eggs

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26/15 'Quails'eggs 1: crushed' Oil on cavas

26/15 ‘Quails’eggs 1: crushed’ Oil on canvas

Finished the three paintings based on quails’ eggs: enough is enough, especially of eggs. Started painting two other works, one centred on a human figure which is very rare for me.

 

 

 

Filed Under: Art

Eight days painting

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28/15 'Quails' eggs 3: hatched' Oil on canvas with broken egg shells

28/15 ‘Quails’ eggs 3: hatched’ Oil on canvas with broken egg shells

Today began a long-planned week and a bit concentrated on painting with as little distraction as possible. Decks have been cleared, the garden is in good order, the election is over and no visitors are expected.

I’ve been waiting for this moment eagerly for some time and in fact got off to a flying start by beginning and completing a first painting yesterday afternoon; and have done two more today. All are small ones and all feature broken quails’ eggs.

First image drops out of The Gallery

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Today the 17th image was added to The Gallery and so, given the fixed number of images, 16, displayed in The  Gallery at any one time, the very first image drops off the display (see Preface for explanation). That image is retained in my programme and I can make it available on request. The former presence of each ‘disappeared image’ will henceforth be recorded in Insight by reproducing there the identifier of and textual entry for each image as previously published in The Gallery. A small image will also be included where appropriate.

The 17th image, ‘White’, replaced the first image which was:

“84/06 ‘Trilithon 15’ Oil on canvas 30 x 25 cms

This is one of a series of images based on the idea of a trilithon. It is one of a pair, representing an immediate, relatively excited, response to the news of the discovery in 2006 of a mid-15th century manuscript containing a tiny drawing of Stonehenge.

10-84.06£200 (2)

As its discoverer observed in his article in British Archaeology (January/February 2007, p. 10), the original tiny (23 x 17 mm) drawing is ‘the first known design to represent Stonehenge not just as a symbolic image, but with precise observations on its form and construction techniques.’ Here I try to be true to those ‘precise observations’: the monument itself in my image is copied from enlarged images of the original as published to try to ensure that the significance of that original is not lost in basing a painting upon it.

 

The reason for copying is that, for the first time, the vignette  shows four trilithons with their lintels penetrated by the uprights’ tenons, not exactly accurate in fact but nevertheless demonstrating a clear understanding of the carpentry technique of mortice and tenon used at Stonehenge to make the joints between vertical and horizontal stones.

I was conscious as I created this early 21st century image that I may well have been the first person for over 500 years to depict Stonehenge in this particular medieval idiom, so nothing in my paintings distracts from the central structure: grey on grey seemed appropriate for the distant view of a small, stone structure in a slight landscape depression but otherwise in no context at all.”

It’s not easy

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Well, it has been a bit of a struggle but at last I have added two more images to The Gallery; their ‘Insight’ text will have to wait till tomorrow.

Actually, there is not much to say about the first, the Martello tower, Aldeburgh, since it is the painting I referred to in yesterday’s post. I thought it would be apposite to include it straightaway when I suddenly saw how to finish it today, and did so (though I am not absolutely certain the red of the sun is quite right). It was just one of those magical couple of hours which occasionally happen: I also finished four others which have been lying around the studio for some time, awaiting their completion. One is another painting of Silbury Hill.