Seven Seconds....

I made this new painting (above) the other night. It was nice to move on from the three paintings I had recently made and posted in April. I’m trying to extend and develop some of the things I have been exploring in my approach. It’s a pretty complicated picture. There were lots of things to deal with that made me think I’m not going to get there with this one, but I think I did in the end. I was interested in the hard, repetitive vertical shapes in the composition and the close tones where I wanted to create a spatial ‘push and pull’, where the space could look simultaneously flat and deep.

My wife, Diane, wasn’t as convinced by my formal concerns when she visited the studio: ‘It’s a bit vertical, isn’t it? I’m not sure about all those vertical shapes’. ‘Oh, that was the thing I was interested in’. ‘There’s not enough tonal contrast, either’. ‘But that was the intention….’. Oh well. Fair enough. They say you only have seven seconds to get the audience with a painting, and I think I didn’t get that far with this one.

But I’m pretty pleased with it anyway….