Here's my painting 'The Potted Hollyhock' just before I took
it to the Royal West of England Academy to be judged for the Annual Open
submission exhibition. The Potted Hollyhock is based on a drawing I made last
spring at The Abbey Art Centre in Barnet, the magical place where I used to
live and work. The canvas lay unfinished for quite some time as the prints
gained popularity, but I always wanted to finish the painting! I finally got
around to doing so once I had settled in my new studio in Bristol where I now
live.
I guess I had a few observations of the paintings of others
in mind when painting this: namely a gorgeous Vuillard still life I saw at the
National Gallery in Scotland nearly 2 years ago - he left so much of the
flowers (the main focal point of the composition) unpainted, leaving the viewer
to fill in the gaps...and although I haven't left many gaps there is an
'unfinishedness' in this painting that I feel adds a vibrancy to the quality of
the paint. Secondly, I had just been admiring some wonderful work by Paul Nash
at the RWA (funnily enough!) and was intrigued by his limited palettes - almost
monochromatic paintings filled with every kind of variation on the colour blue
you could imagine. Again, I wasn't able to limit myself entirely, but just had
the thought in mind. I also had in mind early Freud paintings...when he was
actually interesting, and when he painted the most beguiling interpretations of
plants in pots. If only he had remained interesting as a painter, and
interested in this subjects!
Anyway, I digress... the frame was decorated by me after I
was dissatisfied with the frame I ordered (my fault entirely) and so I took a
leaf out of the book of Vanessa Bell, and also Ben Nicholson, and decided to
paint the frame how I wanted… in a way
that in terms of colour perfectly matched the palette I used, and in terms of
motif, echoes the lines found within the leaf structures, and the shadows cast
on the pot. This is the first painting I have made where I consciously,
comfortably and confidently blurred my distinctions between painting and
drawing, and found a new freshness in the quality of the paint I was working
with.
