FRI 10 JAN 2025
Further extravagencies; new blues and a tear of hot pink in the centre of the top-left pier, which I thought was a bit of a dead-zone that broke the horizontal. It was a choice between light and colour...I went with colour. Lush: loving the intrusion of blue inside the red, softening the red-shape and echoing the transparent green pier below. Denise is now in love with the painting enjoying the new shape 'and the colours are singing'.
18 DEC 2024
'Red Harbour' has come a long way since its beginning in November 2015! Love the writhing reds - more Soutine than Matisse now - the density of colour, the punctuations of blue and green, the curious open-shape formed by the angled line on the right springing back from the bottom edge, leading the eye back into the heart of the painting. Big thanks to Denise for sparking this rework, she never liked the big shape in (4), finding it awkard and cumbersome.
Back in 2015, the start-point was a drawing I made from the fisherman's pier in Porthleven, picking up the rhythms of angles and triangles of cranes and boats, the slipways and the buildings behind. You can still see elements of the drawing in the top third of finished painting, the quayside, angled slipway and triangular crane.
The early stages closely followed the drawing (1) with a sap-green glaze over the slipway adding interest, its liquidity and transparency subverting reality (2).
(1)
(2)
The painting really began when I put the drawing away and turned the canvas: immediately the imagery was less obvious, the space more interesting, almost sculptural in (3), forms, structures are hinted at rather than illustrated, the marks and shapes and colours with their own interest. Now we are looking at the whole harbour, with its three distinctive kinds of water, separated/broken down by the two central pairs of piers. The slipway becomes a pier and the outlines of buildings a geometric language for moving water.
In (4), the painting became a homage to Matisse's 'The Red Studio', the painting, more than any, that has influenced my work. In the bottom-left corner is a tiny linear 'red studio', the Old Lifeboat House where we run our courses. However, I was never happy with the shape of the red mass and the relationship between the four central piers. If you look at Matisse's painting, in the glorious expanse of Venetian Red, each of the individual elements has a strength and character, each contributing to the whole. In my painting, only the transparent green pier had a presence.
'The Red Studio' 1911
Below are two stages of the reworking last week. Firstly bringing in more reds and changing the piers and surrounding blue but the shape became too rounded (5). The breakthrough came with a new dense blue/teal on the left, framing the harbour and bringing in a powerful patch of cobalt-blue to provoke the reds. The last moves were replacing the white streak with a wristy blue curve, and a flash of bright green in the top pier.. The finished painting is much more lively in both colour and movement, less reverential to Matisse and stronger for it, but, I hope, with the same 'presence' of red.
P.S. Soundtrack: 'Brilliant Trees' by David Sylvian., 1984. '..drowning in my nostalgia....'
Bjork, 'Debut' and 'Post', Neil Young 'Southern Man'