Under the Dome (project 8)

This is another part of my garden, or another angle to be more precise. And I’m using a 3″ brush, something I’ve never done before. The support is A1 card, pre-used.

Above is the image I was drawing on. Everything else demonstrates how little, beyond shape, makes it into the actual painting and that’s because I don’t replicate, I build narratives, following where the imagery leads.

This has become a sky river, reminiscent of the falling waters of the Peruvian forests shrouded in mist and seeming to fall endlessly from nothing. Hence the foliage has become a little less Sussex!

I’m using standard acrylics except for the occasional patches of bright, translucent colour where I apply neon pouring paint over titanium white. The dark area on the left is the patio which, as you can see in the photo, has a small table in it. But I am really not keen on adding mundane objects or, much as I am tempted, any of my cats because that changes the whole nature of the image. I’m not sure yet what will go in there to demonstrate its cave-like status although at present I’m seeing a small tunnel with a tiny point of light at the end.

I am struck by the way painting takes the same shape for me as writing. I begin with an idea, in this case an image from the real world, which creates the structure and, just like writing fiction, I have no clue as to where it’s going. I apply paint in accordance with the structure and the nature of the subject matter until suddenly, a new narrative emerges. Quite often, that comes from seeing it as a photo because photos offer social distance and also a reduction in the temptation to become absorbed in detail. I see the shapes and how the colours I’ve chosen enable or disguise them. This frequently takes my imagination away from the initial reality and into something different, often just slightly surreal but not enough to unsettle. This fictional foliage is as chaotic as summer sun and rain have contrived to make my garden, although I’ve given it much more leeway to spread in its fictional form. The sky river can only exist in elevated canopies and wet conditions although in this instance, who’s to say it’s not interplanetary?

It seemed to me the trees needed some pruning and the foreground foliage rendered a little more irregularly.

Then the bright green of the pathway, or whatever it has become, seemed ill-fitting so I have muted it but I odn’t know what it is any more. The texture underlying the white-out of the sky is interesting me and I’m wondering what to make of it. I have a burning desire to scrape a piece of charcoal across it and although that might be reckless, it might also be revelatory.

The burning desire won out and totally changed the meaning of the work. This is cultivation under a dome which, if we’re being today rather than tomorrow, could be an Eden project. Tomorrow though, it could be where we live if we don’t sort ourselves out. Sprayed with fixative.