October 2016 – ARKS, ADAM AND AXARQUIA

Here is a sample of my latest digital reworkings of some of my most commercially successful old library and sketchbook images.

More beautiful girls, fully clothed (more or less) and in regular – taken-from-life (also more or less) poses. The girl in the polka dot dress is an obvious homage to that famous Athena tennis girl poster (from my back garden in Edgware in 1979) and there are also two of my wife Dido (one in Chile – 1991 and the other in the gardens of the Alcazar in Seville – 1988). The other two are of a girl on a trip to Israel from around 1980 (one at Ramon Crater in the Negev and the other at Rosh Hanikra).

I’ve had a few queries regarding the “validity” of these works in comparison to actual paintings, drawings and lithographs etc. Well, all I can say – at the risk of sounding hubristic – is that it takes not a little skill, and an intense amount of work to produce each and every picture. To all intent and purpose I am painting and drawing with the mouse in a way remarkably similar to using pencils and brushes. Often, a digital picture can take longer to execute than one of my old gouache paintings, and the results, for me at least, are just as satisfying. I love the contrast of the natural lines and edges containing pure and clean blocks of tone and colour. The level of satisfaction at completing one of these pictures is likewise, at least as complete as I used to feel after a day or so working on a gouache.

But, as ever, this is only my opinion. See what you think…

I fancied myself as something of a colourist around the the time I started at Saint Martin’s (1978/79), when this selection of oils on paper dates from. The idea of expressing things like bodily posture and even personality and human attitude through blocks of colour – with just a bit of assistance from drawn lines – was a concept which had interested me since I’d first started looking at pictures by anyone, from Matisse to Mathew Smith.

The paintings here are all of people (including one each of my maternal grandparents) done from life, which even then, was unusual for me – I was always more of a studio artist than a “field artist”. All of my early oil paintings were done on paper (like those presented below) or board. It was only once the generous student grant kicked in (those were the days!), when I’d actually begun at St. Martins, with access to subsidised stretchers and countless yards of cotton duck that I was able to enjoy the use of canvas.

Looking at these pictures now I’m struck by how fresh they look, and despite some pretty crude handling of paint, how closely they portray the subjects.

All in all, they’re not half bad, and the pictures of my much-missed booba and zaida (the bottom two – Becky and Harry Pizan) are surprisingly evocative and poignant- for me at least…