Gateway

Penrhos-Feilw K Howell Pastel on Paper 14cm x 21cm

One of the greatest barriers to my obtaining a drivers' licence was a tendency to be distracted by landscape details. Trees. Standing stones. Birds. People. Just about anything outside the car, actually.

But in order to stop for standing stones, you need to be in control of the car, so in the end, it was necessary to keep distraction under restraint to better apply focus.

I love the way standing stones create frames within the landscape. Like ancient figures, marking a gateway. The stature and weight distribution appears anthropomorphic from a distance - their solidity a proper contrast to the whispering grasses.

Standing stones offer a new framework. And a stone circle? Don't get me started...

It was a wet day when I visited these stones; water clung to everything and after wading through the grasses and getting thoroughly wet, the next logical step was swimming in the ice cold Irish sea. With the man-eating jellyfish (They won, in the end. It was a short swim).

Point of Departure

Headland K Howell 14 cm x 21 cm Charcoal

     Playing with charcoal and oil pastel. The sticky oil pastel collects the charcoal dust in rich deposits, allowing you to scratch it away again if you choose. I love the variety of marks you can make with charcoal. I forget about the distinct lack of colour.
      I'm building a collection of sketches to use as a Point of Departure. Strange to see my table covered in shades of grey, but every few years it happens. I pick up a piece of charcoal and wonder why I ever bother using anything else.
     Also strange that this study is a Landscape. I mean, I'm playing by the rules. There's a foreground, a midground and a distant horizon. This is unusual. I'm not sure what to make of it.
     As you can see, I'm still a little in love with those stone-cut graves. But there are Others coming...

Under the Skin

Grove K Howell 2012 Acrylic on Board 40cm x 61cm

     In view of the weather - strangely tired of the ubiquitous grey, lovely as it is - I've been working on a piece based on a study from last spring. There's a wood I frequent that has some clumps of very young trees. I love visiting this little grove because the sinewy trunks are electric and crackling with growth. Still spindly, they are finding their feet. So to speak.
     This piece is not dissimilar to a polarised light micrograph of human skin with hair follicles. (See here at the Science Photo Library, credited to Dr Keith Wheeler.)
     The landscape we live in gets under our skin - but maybe it was always there? Do we recognise design similarities on some level?
     I'm working on another tree portrait now and a winter take on a nearby grove that are both much darker, so this was an interesting sidestep in anticipation of spring, and the world refreshed.

Petrifying Thoughts

Shelter K Howell 2011 Pastel on Paper 14 cm x 21 cm

     My thoughts have been turning to stone. It's been a long, slow process. But I can see that this is definitely happening. Gritstone Edges are a stunning part of the local landscape, and I've been exploring some of these over the past few weeks.
     The forest in which I often paint shelters a gorge with exposed walls of Precambrian gritstone that I've always admired. I love the layers and fractures and lichens. So much to investigate.
     On the moors nearby there are some fantastic isolated stones as well as grouped outcroppings, evocatively named. For instance, we have the Bridestones. The Groom, alas, is fallen. The Hawkstones glare down over the moor, and my personal favourites, the Orchan Rocks, are formidable presences in the landscape. Their solidity provides an interesting foil to the supple nature of trees. I need variety and if you've visited this blog with any kind of frequency, I would imagine you do too.
     You may have noticed I don't do scenes. I'm calling my style a Visual Synecdoche of Landscape. Not sure that will catch on...

The Lie of the Land

Restive. Really. K Howell Pastel on Paper 21cm x 14cm

     I'm all for inversions. I like things inside out, upside down, back to front. So it's no surprise that most of my landscapes are in portrait format. This is because I often do portrait-like details of trees, but also because a vertical layout gives a painting a particular dynamic. Energy is more fiercely contained in an upright oblong. Once in a very long while, I make a conscious effort to work on a proper horizontal, sprawling landscape. I seem compelled to fill the space with the repetitious vertical lines  to compensate for the relaxation of the paper.
     I think of it as a play on energies. According to Carl Jung, Great energy springs from a correspondingly great tension of opposites. Well, it's a theory.
 A piece of paper has such limitations, it's a game to energise it in different ways.
   

Landscape and the Body Done So Very Well #1

A small celebration of Ana Mendieta: 

Her work is immediate and magical, strong and ephemeral. Very Interesting.
 
Ana was born in Cuba in 1948 and exiled to the USA at thirteen with her elder sister, because her family opposed the dictatorship.
 

Themes of exile, violence and the creation/destruction cycle are prevalent, and her work always uses the form, silhouette or imprints of the female body. A woman emerges from a tree; branches make a woman.

Until the last two years of her life, her work was performance, photograph and video based. Still focusing on the female form, she began making object based art.

She married Carl Andre, of 'Equivalent' fame.

She Fell from a Height in 1985.

 

 Ana Mendieta's images of human connection to the landscape are both autobiographical and mythic, and this is the briefest look at her remarkable approach.

Why paint when more immediate work is possible? I'm still trying to work that one out...but there are Reasons.

Branching Out

Landscape and the Body
I'm very interested in the ways we inhabit our bodies and relate to our environment.
I see painting as a way of interpreting the information of the landscape through the human experience of the senses, memory, mythic imagination and physical energy. Very much a living process and highly individual. I'd like my paintings to communicate an experience.
I find I work at three types of painting.  Meditations, Encounters and Discoveries. The Meditation paintings are calm and still, based on colour and form. They are simple, less narrative. Encounter paintings are more confrontational and animistic. The Discovery paintings are often based on anthropomorphic qualities of trees.

So, this post begins at the beginning.

People don't grow on trees. Or step out of trees. That is the stuff of myth. Right? Have a look at this placenta. Well. Tree of Life?

I've played with these ideas before (see below), because the placenta is so full of potential. But it needs developing.
Paintings to come...
Landscape and the Body is a huge topic, and has been explored in many ways already. I'm going to look at a few different approaches I admire later in the week.

So, while I rewrite a novel that stalks me with its faults I remind myself that everything is a process. I've grown a branching tree of words, thrown in LOTS of fertiliser with the decent material and now I have to bonsai the wretched thing into something interesting and to the point, rather than an organic meditation on Stuff.

Sometimes you have to branch out and sometimes trim the branches. My problem is my 'thing' for interesting branches. I have a hard time hacking them off, even if I know they spoil the shape of the tree... Pathetic really. Excuse me while I sharpen my axe.

Making Marks

FIRST POST


Seeing Things and Making Marks. That's what I do. I've decided to use this blog as a way of keeping a record of my work and articulating related thoughts. Because I'm in the uglier throes of a writing project as well, I have to be disciplined. I've noticed my painting lacks subtlety and my writing lacks drama, so perhaps I'm trying to coerce my words and images into the functional relationship the two have been avoiding.

Sometimes my paintings are about a moment in the landscape. I try to summon a sense of Experience and Encounter. Take this Post - it is hidden in a copse. You'd never know it was there. But it sees you coming, and tracks your movements. It has a relatively benign nature, but it was placed for a purpose, and it seems quite intense about Gate Keeping. It is very ghostlike; all traces of the rest of the boundary and gate are long gone. I can't pass it without spending time watching it back. I have a ridiculous attachment to this Post.

So that is my First Post, and an indication of where I'm coming from.