We have continued our playful act of pretending to be gallerists by mounting a small exhibition around the two main rooms chez moi. This time the theme is not conceptual but visual, showing paintings using solid blocks of colour. This note is not a systematic, picture by picture tour around the whole, as with previous exhibitions here, but just a note about some of the more interesting paintings.

 

 

The star of the show has to be my Barbara Rae, a very small painting but nevertheless a Rae. I am a great admirer of hers, particular of her use of colour. I have recently seen some of her paintings of the last two years as she herself has discovered the Arctic and recorded her journeys with a vivid and subtle use of blue, a colour she otherwise does not use a lot.

The, from the sublime to the inferior, two of my A4-sized landscapes created in minutes (but after a lot of thought!) specially for this exhibition. Technically, both revert to a method much-used in my early days i.e. scattering ochre on the card surface and then running oil through and across it or, as in these cases, smearing oil across the surface in meaningful patterns and then scattering ochre across that surface. Then, after a few minutes, tipping the ochre off and seeing what emerges. Neither of these images required much editing since they ‘said’ more or less what I had in mind: that on the left is the landscape of the Alde valley with the river in the centre and the Maltings top right, and on the right is a vertical section through the valley with mud at the bottom. Its darkness is deliberate but I know not why.

 

 

 

 

These two small vertical strips also show the good and the ugly. That on the left is ‘Warrior Queen’ by Rebecca Bergese; that on the right is, by chance, for I painted it long before we acquired Rebecca’s, a clumsy anticipation of what was unknowingly coming sleekly down the track.

 

To be completed with notes on the last three pictures.