This is a bit of a trip down memory lane, a survey, if you will.
First off is a groovy old painting. I painted this about fifteen years ago and sent it off into the world. It’s a precognitive oil painting from my imagination, precognitive because at the time I was living in Wiltshire and I was completely unaware that I would soon be living in the Welsh mountains. I certainly got the weather right.
A wedding gift for a mate from High School who lives in Australia. The painting’s journey to New South Wales was nearly as epic as the view the painting attempts to convey; Jupiter and the volcanic moon of Io, as viewed from Ganymede by an astronaut who only just squeezed into her spacesuit.
Avoncliffe Mill, a mill, on the Avon, near a cliff. There’s an area of York called Clifton, it’s on a cliff. Anyway, back to the mill, I understand it’s been restored, not a moment too soon if you ask me. The painting’s unusual in that it’s acrylic, not a medium I use very much though it is very good for illustration. The image to the lower left is an oil painting based off of the mill and weir, a blurred imagining of that something like a swallow swooping might see as it zips along hunting bugs over the water.
There was a pub called the Cross Guns on the opposite side of the river from Avoncliffe Mill, and the weir ran between the mill and the pub. It’s a nice spot, handy for a shandy, as they may well have never said. In a nearby village dwelt acclaimed Sci-fi Illustrator Jim Burns whose artwork I greatly admire. He was the friend of a friend and I had the good fortune to speak with him a few times. If I’d been smarter, I’d have figured out how to segue from Jim Burns to the painting above.
Shipwrecks are a curiosity of marine painting. I mean, it’s not like paintings of air crashes are a thing, is it? Memes of the Hindenburg, yes, but you know what I mean. Two old ladies tittered with mirth when one of them called the painting ‘a storm in a teacup,’ I guess because the dominant colour is a little like tea. The painting incorporates the cyclonic motion of a weather system, and the debris and crew of a shattered ship being reemed in the laundromat of destiny. What isn’t clear from this clipped image is the complete ship to the top left of the painting, though you can just make out her bowsprit and foresails. There is a trajectory here, a sequence through time. I first saw this in Rajasthan, Mughal images that depicted a sequence of events, often a hunt, in a single picture, but, thinking about it, Turner does this in some of his paintings too.
The Seventh Wave. A drummer acquired this painting because the band he played in had released an album with a song called The Seventh Wave on it.
