I am enjoying working on a square format – haven’t done that for a while.  And really pleased with the surfaces and the blurring of the charcoal.  Need to see the three of them in a row.

Cill Rialaig Mists or Mists at Cill Rialaig – can’t decide, but it feels good.

80 x 80cms  Gesso oil charcoal and graphite.

Still walks but using the contours of the land mass in Kerry and Cornwall to contain the lines.  Trying out Arches HP in place of Fabriano and still finding that the surface degrades as I work on it in a way that I don’t like.  It affects the quality of the line.  Will have to experiment with some different ones.

Went up to London for a couple of days last week and saw first, the John Walker drawings at C4RD which I really liked.  Then the Anish Kapoor at the RA.  I had to go back three times to watch the cannon being fired because I missed it the first time and the second time I saw it go but not where it ended up.  It was quite dramatic.  I loved the white bubble emerging from the wall – missed it first time round which is possibly the whole point but it was very beautiful. And of course the wax train being pushed  through the archways of the wonderful rooms at the RA from one end of the building to the other was mesmerising. Lots of people were having fun with the mirror pieces watching themselves being enlarged, reduced, turned upside down.  Quite Alice in wonderlandish.  Next up the Turner Prize  which is really strong this year.  I identified most closely with the work of Lucy Skaer whose primary practice is drawing and her work on paper is really interesting creating different levels of perception at different distances.  Richard Wright’s gold leaf patterning on the end wall of one of the rooms was exquisitely beautiful and drawing again really.  I still like Roger Hiorns magical copper sulphate room with its seering blue crystals best of his work and I think he was nominated for that, but the work here asks lots of questions about life, death and existence.  His extraordinary installation of the dust from the destruction of a jet engine is like a moon landscape.  Enrico David was the artist who I found least sympathetic, though I have a suspicion he might just win, it’s deliberate boorishness just didn’t appeal to me really.  I went from there to the Jerwood Drawing Prize which I found pretty depressing.  This was obviously an embroidery year with stitched canvas and stitched paper.  The John Baldessari at Tate Modern the next day redresssed the balance.  Lots of interesting stuff – too much to take in all at one go.  Will have to go back.

Pages from my little sketchbook from the summer. St Petersport Guernsey, Lyme Regis, West Bay in green pen because I couldn’t seem to find my pencil, thinking my way through long houses, cooking pots, bus trips and houses on stilts.

On the way to Mount Kinabalu the coach broak down so I had loads of time to draw coconut and banana trees by the side of the road. The Mango tree was in the centre of the city so I drew it from the window of the bus.

I got back from Borneo to find that Veils of Memory has been selected for the catalogue of the fringe mk Painting Competition.

Borneo was amazing!  A far cry from Cill Rialaig!  We went to Mount Kinabalu and walked in the canopy of the rainforest, we went on a river trip through the jungle seeing wild probosis monkeys, macaws, flashes of kingfishers and a glimpse of a crocodile.  We visited a cultural village and learned all about the history of the different tribes and head hunters, saw the smallest orchid in the world and the rarest which were both incredibly beautiful.

I loved the houses on stilts and swimming in the steamy heat of the South China sea, drinking coconut milk out of freshly cut coconuts which were huge and unrecognisable compared to the wizened things we get here.  And the sea food in abundance of every description.  Mangrove swamps, banana trees, mango trees growing in the centre of the city and exotic friuts everywhere.

And everywhere the welcome and the friendliness of the people we met.

The Illusions of Space show at the Brewhouse came down and the talk on the last saturday with the launch of the catalogue was good. I am really pleased with the catalogue since we finally got a decent shot of my big drawing which was heinously difficult to photograph. If any one would like a copy feel free to ask. The text and some images have just  been published in Art Cornwall, (click on the link in the sidebar). Before the show ended I went up to London to the National Gallery to see the Picasso show. I must remind myself never to take any notice of what reviewers say because it got a really bad press and it was wonderful. I got there just as it was opening so there were very few people in there for the first hour which was a bonus. There was lots of work which I hadn’t seen before and the connections that were made with other artist’s work were fascinating. I loved how the monumentality of Ingres’s portrait of Mme Moitessier is reflected in Picasso’s portraits of Marie Thérese Walter and had to rush over to the French rooms afterwards to look at it and my favourite Degas painting of a woman combing the red hair of another woman which Picasso used for another work. The Kuniyoshi was much harder work because I was completely unfamiliar with his work and it was rather a case of information overload and I just couldn’t take it all in. I did love his big A2 sketchbooks with fold out triptyches though. I think I might try that myself.

So back in the studio and I have today finished a big painting inspired by the Transition show at Exeter Castle. I have been working on it for weeks and it is the same dimensions as the drawings and so the same as the floor area of the prison cells, 180 x 120 cms. I have had real trouble with the paint drying too quickly in the heat and so had to put an extra layer of paint on it today to make it work. Its isn’t as smooth a finish as I had originally intended but given the subject matter I rather like the rawness of the finish.

I have called it Veils of Memory which is a bit of a nod to ‘dropping from the veils of morning’ in Yeats poem, The Lake Isle of Inisfree which I love and which is about solitude.

Details below

The last few months have been so stuffed full of exhibitions both planned and last minute that I haven’t really had a chance to work on all the material from my residency at Cill Rialaig. However it has all been simmering away there. The big drawing in the Illussions of Space exhibition at the Brewhouse is based on my journey from Ballinskelligs Beach to Bolus Head but I haven’t really done any work on canvas arising from the residency. The three drawings reproduced here are on canvas but drawn in very fine graphite pencil. The are a response to the Skelligs, the two rocky outcrops off the coast one of which was home to a monastery in about the 6th century. The motion of the waves make it appear that the rocks are constantly moving, rolling over and over and turning in the surf and continually being destabilised.

Skelligs 1. 2009. Gesso oil and graphite on canvas

Skelligs 2. 2009. Gesso oil and graphite on canvas

Plotting pauses in forward movement. 2009. Gesso oil and graphite on canvas.

Well it has been a manic month workwise not helped by two weeks in France with a rubbish internet connection.  But, nice food and wine, evenings with friends and four novels later, back to the real world.  Before France I was down in Cornwall for two days submitting work to the selection Committee for the Newlyn Society of Artists who accepted me as a member, hurrah!  The weather was gorgeous and I discovered Sennen Beach, I am sure I have been there before, but this time I had Gigi with me and it was seventh heaven for an Irish Setter, racing along the sand in the late evening sun!  I also went to see Andy Currie’s installation at The Exchange in Penzance.  Long swathes of diaphanous, transluscent fabric suspended form the ceiling and leaping and dancing in the breeze, need to use the word zephyrs really, from a bank of fans on the floor.  All the mechanics showing deliberately so you were not distracted by the thought, now how has he done that?  There was something poignant about it, perhaps because the movement was so ephemeral.  But like my work a photograph doesn’t give a real idea of what it is like because the movement is so mesmerizing.
End of April saw me putting the finishing touches to my big drawing for the Brewhouse show Illusions of Space which opened on Saturday 2 May.  Lots of images on http://illusionsofspace.wordpress.com

It took all week to install the show and predictably my large drawing has been incredibly difficult to photograph.  Too far away and you can really only see white paper against white wall and too close and you don’t get a sense of the scale and the feeling of being able to walk into the space.  So if anyone wants to see it properly they are going to have to go to the show!

Installation view.  (from left) From Ballinskelligs Beach to Bolus Head (detail below) with works on canvas by Pennie Elfick (right) and intervention by George Meyrick (above)

Below detail of Turbulance by Andy Currie Installation at The Exchange Penzance  http://www.newlynartgallery.co.uk/?Andy%20Currie