The nose cone of a missile. This has taken centre stage somewhat ironically in many of his works from the ‘Cathedral’ series where it took the form of Gothic Arch in other works on paper and large canvases. e.g. ’Double Incident’ 1987 -244 x 244 cm & ‘Blue Cathedral’ 1988 - 300 x 350 cm. This object reminded him of the child’s game whip and top, hence some later pieces using the spinning top image. There is both a playful and serious element in these works.
On the one hand there is the dangerous game (The war-game) and on the other the child’s game. In ‘Group Therapy’ 1989 - 180 x 275 cm he shows four spinning tops in a circle all in motion, the title suggests people trying to communicate, bouncing off each other and getting nowhere. But there is a sense that something more sinister is going on, this is the dangerous game, played with stand-offs and threats. It is the game of missiles not of whip and top.
The spark for the shift away from Shifts was a gift of some temptingly thick artist’s paper and a trip to Scotland, in 1980.
I just loved the big open spaces, the wildness and the isolation of the Hebrides. I cycled all the way there from Edinburgh. I only spent one week sketching but it set off two years’ work. There are these little sources that have.
I was given this pile of thick, hard-surfaced paper a bit like what you used to call Whatman paper for water colours. I started to try and free up. I got quite interested in making marks with the brush and putting more energy into the work. So I started to work freely referring to landscape, painting from my imagination and from my memory of experiences of places I had been to, like the Hebrides, showing that sense of things coming through in the atmosphere.
The way it is
The way I think it is
The way it could be
The way I think it could be
The way it should be
The way I think it should be
The way I want it to be
The way I think I want it to be
The way it was
The way I thought it was
The way it could have been
The way I thought it could have been
The way it should have been
The way I thought it should have been
The way I wanted it to be
The way I thought I wanted it to be
Painting finds its form through continuity, a development from preceding work . It is part of a continuing process – idea in an isolated sense never occurs. It is one idea which changes and evolves, it can become more complex, it can be clearer through simplification. Paintings, drawings, prints are all part of this process. Audience has no part in this private dialogue; later it witnesses the residue.
Commission….. reference to Yorkshire…….not stifling or inhibiting demands, but enough to set up a different relationship between myself and the work. Awareness of an audience is present from the start; concept , form and colour cannot develop through the same questioning and reassertion carried from previous work. The content must in some way relate to the specific. Yorkshire – landmarks, structures, dales, rivers. Cities contained by landscape. The close hidden places remembered. The new, alien structures within a familiar frame. Motorway networks dissecting memory.
Introduction to a book of drawings relating to a commissioned painting. Published by Watmoughs Holdings PLC
Painting finds its form through continuity, a development from preceding work . It is part of a continuing process – idea in an isolated sense never occurs. It is one idea which changes and evolves, it can become more complex, it can be clearer through simplification. Paintings, drawings, prints are all part of this process. Audience has no part in this private dialogue; later it witnesses the residue.
Commission..... reference to Yorkshire.......not stifling or inhibiting demands, but enough to set up a different relationship between myself and the work. Awareness of an audience is present from the start; concept , form and colour cannot develop through the same questioning and reassertion carried from previous work. The content must in some way relate to the specific. Yorkshire – landmarks, structures, dales, rivers. Cities contained by landscape. The close hidden places remembered. The new, alien structures within a familiar frame. Motorway networks dissecting memory.
My first twenty years were spent in the West Riding. I know it, I know it but it is no longer intimate. The drawings are attempts to contain this, to focus thought and experience --- the painting took its direction from there.
John Loker 1984