Three months since my last post.. Time seems to go by faster and faster. My paintings have been going slowly, but steadily. Working full time + hours doesn't leave a lot of spare time to paint, but I have to earn a living, and with my new job I can't think of a better way to earn what I need. In fact, the great people I work with and others that I get to meet have offered me new perspectives and ideas about my artwork. One such person was a customer I got to know briefly before he moved back to Iceland, but before doing so, he forwarded me a couple books he thought I might be interested in. He thought of these books in reference to my work after seeing it at a recent show I was selected to be a part of. These books are what I wanted to discuss in this post.
The first book I read was called Industrial Ruins: Spaces, Aesthetics, and Materiality by Tim Edensor. The other book is called Edgelands by Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts. Both books are about a certain type of space that I am attracted to and tend to choose as the subject for my paintings. They are the types of places that we all navigate through almost daily but rarely pay any attention to. They are places where city/ town meets country, disused places, space without function but not without value. These places exist all around, along railways, industrial ruins, ditches and creeks under motorways, empty lots, foot paths. These are places where weeds begin to reclaim the space where cement has been lain. They are places in flux. They don't serve commodification purposes, and in essence, they don't function in any way. They just exist.
I had never considered why I was attracted to these places and simply chose them as subjects of my work because they had an interesting mix of geometric and organic shapes, an interesting natural patterning, or a particularly strong feeling of place. Yet after reading Edgelands and Industrial Ruins, I started to notice how many of my paintings featured these places. I realized how strongly I was attracted to them because of their lack of societal definition, their refusal to be named or recognized as having this purpose or that. I had always wanted to remove obvious narrative, politics, and statement from my work and, these places act as a metaphor for the ideas of temporality, change, and becoming that I am interested in. These places have a beauty all their own; the orange sunset glaring off the railroad tracks that lead into the cool purpling blackberry bushes, the lazy summer grasses bouncing above a gravel pull-out, or a still ditch holding all the trees and the entire sky above it within its irregular frame.
These books have lent me a new appreciation for these types of places. These places have lent me a renewed appreciation for the everyday breathtaking beauty of life. I recommend each, especially Edglands which is written as poetic prose.
From Mile End Road, Oil on Sized Canvas, 142 x 111 cms.
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