ianwarburton

  oil on paper. 120x130 cms This is not a painting of a sky. I did not intend it to be but wanted to start thinking about the integration of air and objects in my observation of nature and wanted to try to paint that. Okay it looks like a sky to me and it will to anyone else but when I began to move the colours around and the broad brush, the spatula and the roller and whatever else was to hand, to make an abstract painting, this happened. Now I ask myself what I am to do with it. I have made an object which references something likely observed but not a painting of a sky. And yet..... I'll have to give it more thought.

                                                   remnants. oil on canvas.120x120cm So my intention has been to explore a language that might help me think about how marks made with paint could help me make sense of what I see and think. Constable said that painting was another word for feeling: for me it is another vehicle for thinking. One painting might be finalised relatively quickly, perhaps in a day, although these three have taken longer ,whilst another might have a gestation period lasting years. Interestingly no concept survives the distance between starting and finishing because so much can change in that time and it is likely that there will be dead ends and editing and reworking of ideas. Inspiration has no place here: doggedness does. 

                                         hedge and string. oil on canvas. 179x149 cms And so I looked again at space surrounding my workspace and I looked through boxes of black and white photographs seeking a clue, some organisation of, and push and pull of a space. I can see it when I am outside or considering how to extract something from what I am seeing that will work on a number of levels in the painting. It is however the sometimes badly made photographs that will provide the clue, the yeast which develops the painting itself. That question of what am I looking at that interests me. 

                                                        late garden.  oil on canvas. 170x150cm I am reading The Sound of Sleat The life of an artist, John Schueler , edited by Magda Salveson and Diane Cousineau. It is one of those books which sits almost but not quite unnoticed on ones bookshelves until some moment prompts us to open it and begin to read. The painting here, which predates beginning The Sound of Sleat by some weeks and has no connection with Schueler's own work never the less does seem to herald a shift once more in my approach to my painting. Although I am close up again to the surface and work close up so that I am not aware of the rectangle it still has a recessional space, still invites participation in the perceived experience of a garden. This first of three still eluded me in that I wanted even more confrontation, more shallow space in fact. Hence the move to the next painting.

                                                                   oil on canvas  160x120cm Because this is not the painting that I set out to paint. I thought that I would make something like the small paintings in the previous post but either I couldn't sustain the method over a large surface or, it simply became defeated by the size. Or maybe I become lost and in finding my way to some sort of resolution, the journey changed direction.  I was in conversation with a friend who weaves: we talked about maintaining direction, the integrity of the vision, the fact that if in his case it all goes awry he must tear it down and start again where as I, can just slap on some more paint or scrape it off. Integrity does interest me. I want the paint surface to have meaning and to be honest in its application and intention. While painting there is always that interrogation as to what it is that we think that we we are doing. One of the things that this painting asked of me was whether there

garden. oil on canvas. 40x40 cm This painting began a new development for me wherein I sought to layer marks on to the surface to both mimic the density of what I was observing. It is nothing new I know but quite an intense experience for me.