Shadow Paintings Colour Archives

After completing a recent painting (see below), I wondered whether to add colour as per the initial idea, but I liked the painting as it was and was concerned about spoiling it. The consensus among friends was to leave it as it was – which I did.

A Past Present 1 - oil and leaves on canvas

Instead, I decided to create some much small works to see how the addition of colour would work and the following small canvases were the result. I do like the addition of colour as it reflects the idea of the mind trying to animate a relic of the past in order to imagine the object as it was in a time long since passed. Looking at the blackened leaves (representing the shadows of the leaves acquiring form) becoming green with the sky behind, I think this process is well articulated. I will now work these up to larger canvases.

I’ve started painting again and have begun my journey using water-based oils which I must say are rather good. The question has been, at the start of this journey – what to paint?

Having worked on my tree shadow paintings using inks, I decided to do the same with the oils, projecting the video onto a canvas and tracing the shadows in black paint.

Having completed a few of these, I knew I wanted to look at the spaces between the shadows, as if to imagine the world in which the shadows were filmed – a world of colour (just like the world of black and white photographs and films). It’s been a while since I painted, so I was also interested in feeling my way with the paints again and getting back into painting onto canvas.

As well as painting again I’ve been reading about painting too, in particular about an artist I’ve admired for a while; Ivon Hitchens. I’ve been looking also at Howard Hodgkin and his attempts to paint memories, something which I’ve been interested in trying myself (see below).

So over the last week or so I’ve continued exploring the paint as a medium and the surface of the canvas, pushing the image and seeing where it leads which has been a very liberating experience.

As well as these, I attempted tis evening to start painting memories. The first attempt was whilst listening to my late mum singing at St. Martin’s in the Fields in London in 1984. I’d expected to find myself painting a version of that night and the interior of the church, but found myself instead painting the garden of my childhood home as it was in my head – at dusk on a summer’s night.

Now I’m not saying in anyway these are (even though they are not finished) successful images, but I just found it interesting to see what came out on the canvas. I did the same with a specific memory, again set in a garden, but this time that of my Nan and Grandad’s house when my brother and I were staying there. One summer’s night we couldn’t sleep, so my Nan came to our room and took us out in the garden to watch the storm. It’s one of my most vivid memories and again it was interesting to see what turned up on the canvas.