FUTURE
I have completed almost 50 of the doodles in the dark and while I’m not finished
with that approach, I am at the same time thinking to go into a different direction.
One quickly finds that it is not so easy to stray from a chosen path, but it’s fun to
experiment. So in this section are experiments. Some finished, some woefully
unfinished. Some seem promising; some are disasters in the making. But always,
onwards and upwards.
Here are a few examples of what inspires me.
A few years back I was in Madrid, and discovered the Museo Lázaro Galdiano.
It is located all the way in the north of the city and has a fabulously eclectic
collection, which includes a Hieronymus Bosch, whose St John the Baptist bears
an uncanny resemblance to my cousin Louis. In the bookshop I found a little
book about a tree that had fallen in the museum’s garden, entitled Árbol Caído,
Fallen Tree. There were also the letters MAB on the cover, which referred to
Miguel Ángel Blanco. This artist concentrates on trees and the book was full of his
artwork inspired by fallen trees. I bought it, then lost it somewhere in my studio.
Until I found it and let myself be inspired by it. So far, there are four pieces, and you can find them in the second section under Current Work.
A third new series is inspired by a flight from Europe to the States, to be precise over Greenland. The skies were very clear and the view I had of Greenland was phenamonal. I took pictures, dozens of pictures, and am about to embark on a new series about greenland and the amazing ice on this earth.
I often paint on panel. Some panels are made up of layers of laminate.
Accidentally, I left one such panel outside for several months and when I found it
again, under the influence of rain and snow and wind and sun, all the layers had
fanned out like pages in a book, and had weathered and darkened. I was quite
taken by how it looked and decided to use it as a surface. There is not a lot of it
so it’ll have to become an inspiration for something else.
Especially in the time that I painted my big acrylics on canvas, I was
often asked why I didn’t paint still lifes or landscapes. Truth be told, I don’t know.
I don’t mind painting a landscape while on vacation as I now do when I’m in my
French village of Castelnau-de-Montmiral (“CdeM”). I started a series of
watercolors. Here are two. I’m thinking I could show them there
– in my little medieval/renaissance village. Actually, in our own street, is a house
whose owner holds regular art shows in her semi-basement, which comes out on
her garden. Where she organizes delightful receptions after openings. I'm having a show there in Spring 2024.
