I started this painting on April 21st and somehow failed to generate my usual running commentary. And nor can I find the reference photograph! I do have an image record though.

Thereafter, the painting slipped its mornings and took its own course. I’m using a piece of A1 card on which there is a collage of various materials, including some reflective strips across the middle. I’d planned to use this to advantage in the new painting, maybe scratching through to reveal some of the shine. But the painting was having none of it. It wanted to be much more mature and painterly and so I followed its lead. This is what happened next:

It’s worth noting that, even though I didn’t like this early version, I did like the sky and the brushwork in the mid-ground land. I could have left the sky as it was but didn’t have the confidence to do that. It felt too raw, too unfinished, and there’s shaping in it that I’ve never seen in a sky.

There’s the reflective material. There are contexts where that would go down well but this isn’t one of them.

I’ve quite enjoyed making a turbulent river reminiscent, in my mind, of the Strid near Bolton Abbey in the Yorkshire Dales. It terrified me as a child and with good reason – it’s a washing machine that pins objects that get into it against its sides so their chances of emerging are quite low. And I don’t recall seeing any barrier to becoming one of those objects.

Cathexis doesn’t make a painting though and I’m not sure I like it enough to keep. It doesn’t give anything to the sky and I like that better. We’ll have to see. An evening of giving it side-eye will help.

24th April. Side-eye left it as is although largely because I’m in torpid post-vaccination mode. It may change. Meanwhile, I’m rather taken by this new overlay. No structures, just people, lots of them.

25th/26th April. Side-eye delivered its judgment and the turbulent water had to go. The reason for this was that it didn’t seem to belong. Wherever I got the style from, it was out of step with everything else. The presentation needed to be a smoother kind of turbulence; the sort that implies strong currents but has no breaking surfaces. Something more like the sky. I also needed to restore the greenery so that it touched the other bank mid-left of the picture.

Types of Moving Water
Clecky Beck; orange one day, purple the next.
The Ouse; roaring through York like a deep, black, wet, Ghan.
Southport’s sea; mostly MIA somewhere round an invisible corner.
Duluth’s canal; walls of seiches rolling in place.
The Adur; brown tidal mud that passes by four times a day but never waves.

Conboy-hill, 2024

SCH 2024