SAT 4 JAN 2025
An exotic palette for my first painting of 2025, 'Porthleven 77 (Kasbah)'. The title came after: a memory of Matisse's 'Entrance to the Kasbah', sparked by the curves at the back of the harbour. Enjoying the seductive colour, the delicious ambiguities between piers, shapes and spaces, and the unexpected echo of the top red curves in the bottom right corner.
'The frisson between information and imagination, shape and space, line and mass, strength and fragility, deliberation and chance...'
'Entrance to the Kasbah' 1912 Henri Matisse
The painting began with play: repetitions of small blocks of colour with variations of tool, direction and scale (left). Paint on paint, paint adjacent, paint through paint, paint removed. Originally in a landscape format, the central dark marks formed a tentative harbour-shape. Changing orientation, in a painting full of possibilities, I flooded the canvas with a lemon-based yellow, isolating the marks that excited me most - the grouping of small blocks now along the bottom edge (right).
I saw this grouping as the harbour entrance and this simple line drawing on scrap paper became the template for the painting, bringing in structure, context, meaning and difference, with the twin curves springing from the central axis a new element alongside the familiar.
