The invitation to produce Transcription works gave me the chance to examine how other painters have used the human figure….in various settings …as their subject matter.

As their view of their world. So I visited the National Museum in Cardiff to seek paintings of people, in interiors or in landscapes.  I had in mind painters like Gauguin, Vuillard, Denis, Manet. Their paintings have characteristics which interest me….areas of flat colour, areas of decoration, strong poetic but unreal colours, almost conventional but flattened perspective. All had been influenced by Japanese prints.  Despite the many fine paintings in Cardiff, nothing I saw captured my transcription interest.  So I returned home undecided.

 

However, over the next few days I thought more and more of “ Lovers “  painted in 1956 by Michael Andrews, who was a noteable British painter during the 1960’s and 70’s. It is one of the smallest paintings in Cardiff (6ins x 8ins) and I realised that it had many of the elements I was looking for. Two figures in an enigmatic space, a vague light source and a subject….lovers and love…which is of a  universal nature and is open to many interpretations. So by adopting this painting as the core of my project I could work around it in the form of variations on a theme. I retained the original Andrews general composition in all but one of my paintings.

 

My established painting style is representational and is based on drawing from observation. I do a lot of life-drawing and I am by long practice a landscape painter. I find the particularity of the real world often more mysterious than the generality of  invention so most of my paintings begin from observation but when this is subjected to the painting process it becomes an amalgam of reality and imagination. I work with thorough and detailed preparation. This means that the painting is planned in numerous sketches, roughs, altered and developed images, before any marks are put on the canvas. Whether for watercolours or oil paintings I usually make a real-size acrylic version which I work on and develop through many stages, until I’m happy with the general content and composition.  The image is then transferred to the canvas, using a squared grid, and initial blocking in of the image is done with acrylic as an underpainting.  Then oil-paint.

 

For this project I have worked on six large paintings and six smaller ones, (wall space is limited in the two galleries, so some may not be hung). Because of the wide range of possibilities I have done research around the subject but have not done analysis or historical research about Michael Andrews or his painting.  Instead I have read, recalled, listened to, watched and looked at paintings, films, theatre, poetry, music and songs….about lovers and love. I don’t know how much this has affected the paintings. It is a very difficult subject to paint. It is obvious when reading poetry, listening to songs etc. that the course of true love never did run smooth….that there is often a sting in the tail,  an unhappy ending. So I have not tried to refer directly to the subtleties of emotion in the paintings. Paint is, for me, an inappropriate medium for telling stories although there is always a narrative possibility, but interpretation must, as always, be left to you the viewer.

 

However, because of the myriad words and music and images which have been rattling about in my head, to my delight and satisfaction, I have been seduced, (appropriately), into giving the paintings titles which are extracted from poems, songs etc. They are not specific to particular works and are interchangeable and are so brief as to be not easily identifiable. It is not necessary to know the origin of the title, nor even the title, in order to engage with the painting.  But…because the artists in this project have been asked to explain as much as possible about their creative process, I have given sources of the titles on the blog, and in my case, in my journal.