TRIP

It's now just a few days until I jump into a helicopter to spend a quiet festive holiday on Lundy island, and I am busily trying to finish work in the studio in preparation for my next solo show at the Anise Gallery in March.

I had to share this one with you, which is finished and awaiting its varnish: called Trip, I am very proud of it, and it announces some real progress in the way I work:

There are some technical developments as I continue to discover the potency of brushwork in acrylic.  This moves towards an effective simulation of how corrosion is overpainted in an attempt to cover it up, but then the oxide pokes through again.  This is the scourge of the mariner, and in this case I begin to understand it by continually creating the rust, then overpainting it, in probably 6 cycles here.

Also, I feel myself moving away from literal references to ships, if ships are even the subject of this work at all.  I feel that the surface I am representing is metallic, and I feel the work of the corrosion upon it, as I have just explained.  It is certainly from some harsh place, and I have captured it and varnished it.   The tragic line that crosses the work horizontally and appears to be dividing it into two is due to some violent agency that I can't explain, and what are those four brass plates that are fixed to the surface, and which appear to have evaded the decay that is elsewhere?  Are they hinges to something beyond? - I honestly don't know.