home again

After the private view of my exhibition Fall at the Martin Tinney Gallery in Cardiff, we stayed a night with Martin and Nick in Penarth. The following morning Peter and I…

… together with Jack, Philippa…

… and Dave…

… left for a short holiday. First we stayed two nights at Lydford in Devon…

… where we visited Bratt Tor and the cross erected by Peter’s great, great grandfather, the artist William Widgery.

Fired up by the atmospheric landscape, I paid a tribute to the moorland sequence of An American Werewolf in London!

Then we travelled to Cornwall where we stayed at the Gurnard’s Head Hotel, followed by a night in St Ives before heading back to Wales and Dave and Philippa’s house in Penarth.

Jack was made welcome in the bar of the Castle Inn and Pub in Lydford where he made some new friends both four-legged and two, though he was plumb tuckered out from his exertions on the moor by the time this was taken on the second night! Dave’s coat has made his blanket and pillow.

I’ll post more about the exhibition and the holiday tomorrow. But right now, like Jack in the above photo, I need my bed!

private view

Private View days are a mixture of the exciting and the terrifying. Always the fear that no-one will come, or if  they do come, may hate the work. (Or even worse, feel nothing for it. Hate is better than indifference when it comes to art.) I haven’t yet seen The Rapture (the detail above has been turned sideways) framed and up on the gallery wall, and so that’s an interesting experience in store. It’s only the second painting of such a size that I’ve made, and as it left the studio the morning after it was completed, there wasn’t exactly much time to meditate on its finished state. Today’s Private View at the Martin Tinney Gallery is also the PV of the mixed Christmas Exhibition held on the first and lower ground floors, so there will be much to see there. My exhibition, Fall,  is in the large gallery on the ground floor, so I shall be like the filling in the jammy dodger! (Explanation to American friends: a jammy dodger is an old-fashioned, factory-made split ‘cookie’ with a jam filling!)

Here I go. Deep breath. Head high. Best foot forward.

the box of delights

I commissioned Artlog visitor Chloe Redfern to make a set of her festive hangings as a Christmas present for some very close friends of twenty-five years standing, and the results are simply lovely. I’m hoping the intended recipients won’t be checking the Artlog too often or they’ll see the gift intended for them, but I can’t resist showing what a beautiful job Chloe has done.

Artlog visitors  may recall what a big kid I am when it comes to traditional Christmas tree decorations (see HERE and HERE) and I’ve long looked at Chloe’s Etsy shop and yearned after some of the beautiful things I’ve seen there. However there is nothing quite like splashing out on gifts that you hope will delight the people you’re acquiring them for. I know these will give a great deal of pleasure when they’re unwrapped from their red tissue paper, and luckily we shall be present to witness the delight! Perfect!

Chloe is one of a small handful of regulars to the Artlog who took up my challenge of making maquettes, and the horses she produced will appear in the online exhibition I plan to post here next year. There will also be maquettes by artists Natalie d’Arbeloff,  Zoe Blue, Paul Bommer and  Philippa Robbins… some of who have already completed their offerings… plus anyone else who would like to join in. (Natalie is ahead of the game, already producing delightful animated films with her maquettes! Read about them at Blaugustine by clicking on the link in the blog list at the top right of this page.)

Thank you Chloe. You’re a star!

(I LOVE those horses!)

last painting completed for the exhibition ‘Fall’

Hold

2011 – Acrylic on Panel – 76 x 50 cm

Fall, my exhibition at the Martin Tinney Gallery, runs 24th November – 23rd December. You can view the work if you click on the above gallery link, or in slightly more detail HERE. Enquiries may be made at the gallery.

wolf sgraffito

Yesterday I roughly blocked in the new painting. I chose a very limited palette to keep the whole thing coherent: Pthalo Blue (Green Shade), Transparent Red Oxide, Transparent Yellow Oxide, Nickel Azo, Light Ultramarine, Mars Black and Titanium White. Red Oxide for the undercoat. Today I worked up the wolf’s head. Not quite finished that yet, but here are images of what’s been done so far. I’ve used areas of sgraffito to suggest its bristly coat.

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I’ll have to keep my head down to complete this tomorrow, but I think it’s going to be possible. Everything seems to be progressing well so far.

the last one

I’ve begun the last painting for my forthcoming exhibition. There are just a couple of days to bring it to completion if I’m to deliver it to the gallery on Saturday ready to be hung next week. Luckily I have a frame ready for it. It’s based on this chiaroscuro Hervé and the Wolf study made a couple of months ago.

 

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Below is the painting at the end of the first day on the easel . Quite a way to go to pull this one together in a very short time. Tomorrow had better be a good day!

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the rapture, completed remembrance sunday 2011

The Rapture

2011 – Acrylic on Panel – 153 x 122 cm

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The Rapture

Earlier that day, sensing something

archangelic in the air, they cordoned off

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the cool piazza, locked the domed

basilica, closed the crossing

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to the island charnel house and church.

When the quattrocento stage was set,

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they sent the scapegoat out, the lure –

fishing-rod in hand, patched terrier

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to heel – and drew the blackout curtains

close. When he walked in later,

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brilliant as the fish he held, they gathered

round to touch his suit and sun-bleached

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hair: So did it speak? they asked, afraid;

What colour were its wings? And did it

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burn? No words, he said, or fire;

but from that height I saw beyond

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the valley to an exit road where drones

then jetplanes strafed a speeding column

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black, and men crept into holes, their

pounded flesh the many colours of his wings.

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Damian Walford Davis 2011

e-mail from clive to damian

Dear Muse

The painting is just about done. I’m off to the studio and I will be completing it, I would hope, by mid-afternoon. Yesterday I made some substantial changes to it and with astonishing rapidity that which had been driving me to near despair became whole instead of a poorly assembled patchwork quilt. What a relief! I slept soundly last night, no wandering off to the studio in the small hours!

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Peter will photograph it when the daylight has gone and we can set up the studio lamps. It’s going to be bugger to get right as it’s so big to cast an even light over, but Peter did Green George with the same lamps so hopefully he’ll prevail. The painting is due to go on the Artlog before midnight. We’ve had consistently high visitor stats during the progress of this painting, and it’s been a challenge to sometimes show what I have not been happy with at the end of each day at the easel. Yesterdays post, where the unresolved became resolved, made me very happy. Certainly the poem, finished ahead of the painting, impacted it in many ways. Tobias transformed from a brunette to a blonde, I completely re-thought the fish and made the decision to leave the sky an uninterrupted  field of near black. Sigificantly a print-out of the poem lay next to the easel, and as I read and re-read it throughout each day, the tone of it transferred to the panel, aided and abetted by Britten on the CD player. Now poem and painting seem hatched from one egg to me, which is as it should be seeing as they’re twins, though the slow one certainly took his time emerging!

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So from now on the painting will not be ‘Tobias and the Angel’, as it has been throughout the process of its creation, but will bear your title, to be revealed when it goes online tonight. I assume that you might one day want to publish the poem and that as such you’d prefer it didn’t appear on the Artlog with the painting. If I’m wrong about this then please tell me, because though clearly it would be lovely to yoke them together I’ll entirely understand if you’d prefer me not to. (I’m happy enough that the poem is to be on the gallery walls, available to all who visit there.)

Love

C xxx

e-mail from damian to clive

Dear Master,

What a lovely email. You’re a writer as well as a painter, Mr H-J.

The painting is astonishing. It really is. Tobias’s shoe against the conifer forest is stunning, as is the collection of built objects around the basilica, and the beautiful shadow of the graveyard wall. I’m so grateful to you for inviting me to respond to the work; it’s been so exciting clocking in to see the latest, and then going back further on the blog to see the several stages. Can’t wait to see it whole, later today.

Please do put the poem up — it doesn’t exist separately from the painting in my mind. It’s meant to be a very dark poem, really: a hint of sacrificial victimhood in some way delivered from horror by confronting it from an aerial view. I got that immediately from the painting in its early stages.

Let’s work together again. And congratulations, mister.

Dxx

radical changes

Better photographs today as for once I was able to take them by daylight. Usually they’re done after dark with lamps shoved in rather than set up properly.

Last night I spent an hour looking at the painting while preparing my schedule of work on it over the weekend. Occasionally as I work my way over the surface of a large panel such as this one, something that was fine two days ago suddenly makes me uneasy because of what has been subsequently painted elsewhere in the composition. Sometimes these knock-on effects can be quite catastrophic. (Anyone who thinks that a painting is so well planned that once the idea is in my head the execution is a shoe-in, would be surprised by how chaotic things can get.) So it came about that when I completed the foreground of the painting, the lake that had been fine up until then quite suddenly appeared weakened. I was loathe to start over because there were some lovely passages of ripples and a suggestion of depth and a wind-ruffled surface, but once the idea was in my head that it needed to be much darker so that it was closer to the colour of the sky, the problem simply had to be addressed. So today that was one of my tasks, and the result has lifted my spirits.

The dog too needed re-painting to make more of the brightness of his white fur. There had been too much turquoise shadow in it.

But the good news was that some of the additional detailing I’d planned for the landscape became unnecessary, and so my to-be-done-list was shorter than I’d expected. Both of Tobias’ shoes to be completed plus Raphael’s right hand, some woodland and a bridge to be done and a garden to be painted next to the basilica. I got most of that finished this afternoon.

The bridge painted in at last.

I invariably use my own hands and feet as ‘models’ for paintings as they’re always available, either viewed directly or in a small mirror. In this painting a pair of Peter’s leather shoes shod Raphael and a pair of my own suede lace-ups (see image below) served for Tobias.

Luckily the day has gone well and although there is work yet to be done, tomorrow afternoon Peter shall be lighting and photographing the finished painting (no more of my often out-of-focus images taken in poor lighting conditions with a small digital camera) and an image of the entire composition plus the title of the work will be posted here on Sunday night. This I can promise.