English Oak

Quercus Robur

GU: The paintings are made in one session, wet through wet; from preparation to completion this is one day. Although small studies accumulate over weeks and months, they are also painted in one swift session. You must forget everything you know about painting that has been learned, in order to find the inner life of each one.

I choose not to rework the surface of a painting over several separate intervals and long periods of time - my situation and mood is always changing and the expression of this, drawn, layer upon layer in the paint looks confusing. My intervention, any reflection of myself in the work is made simple by the use of restricted handling time and I favour the result of clarity and purity of expression.

This does mean I may not finish up with a painting. In repeat sessions you will always end up with a painting, but here there is no room for making adjustments in order to resolve an image that does not reveal its face - there is losing without re-finding. A painting can be easily lost.

A single session of activity means a particular viscosity of paint and surface texture. Not a mottled slow pace, not a dissolving image, not areas of colour surfacing from beneath a heavy, laboured surface. But rather a silken drawing, a lightness of touch and a romance of weightless line that gives the sensation of liquid or air moving un-inhibited in its atmosphere.

I work with paintbrushes on poles and use these to move fluid masses of paint over the canvas; like a sea of paint pushed and pulled through itself with immediacy and sensitivity to bring lyrical, rhythmical passages of drawing. As the surface dries the history of actions remains. Like capturing and holding in your eye the moment black ink drops and bleeds into water, the promise of the paint drying means stopping and making immovable the hairlines and strict clarity of contrasting black and tinted white. I do acknowledge both light and colour. One of the seven spectral colours is mixed into in the white. They appear as black and white paintings but I consider them as colour just the same.

I paint from the environment in which I find myself living. I like to behold my subject. At the moment the dominant feature in the landscape around me is the tree. It is the timeless and universal subjects in this world that keep me interested...things that have and will remain unchanged over the course of generations. Quercus robur, the English oak, is one of these I feel.

I see the tree as a character whose form and personality is affected by external influences in the same way that people are. It is a powerful symbol that the world shares some experience or other of. The paintings are portraits to me. Landscape treated like still life.

Berger 'looking for the face'

'the search...the losing the refinding... a slight sign of its inner life...'

As a child the world that I lived in was one of farming, working with the land and with nature. Within this world of labour and resistance men inevitably faded back into the soil they once turned. Human time seemed only relevant in life and death. The seasons carried the workers forward. The weather could be friend or foe. What interested me was that all this endeavour would exist in reality one day, then as memory the next only to be eventually lost. One harvest was replaced by the next and the whole cycle was reworked again and again, year after year, generation after generation. The men would come and go but the physical evidence of their labour would be imprinted into the ground they had worked - hedging, furrows, trees planted, soil cultivated…

I see the field as a working painting set in a frame. The process is time based as in painting. A painting can mark a period of time, the paint and the image worked over many days or months. An empire of thoughts, actions and events are embedded in the work by the artists hand; an historical, physical artefact, the remains of time. This process seemed indirect, as if meandering through a landscape retracing ones steps and the final destination changing. I wanted something direct one thought one experience, to hold time by speeding up the painting this is exciting, more of a performance flirting with chance and control and the impossibility of becoming stuck. Picasso said of Bonnard " he seeks I find" i think he was talking of the difference not only in personality but also in the time taken to find the image. I turned my painting into a creamy sea to draw in and let it set. I have always been drawn to images that have a timeless quality something ancient. It was not the subject of the tree which grasped me, it was the presence and feeling of the tree itself. As real as looking someone in the face. For Morandi the bottles become figures or monumental forms placed in space. The 'nature morte' is far from dead because by looking the painting becomes active and the forms jostle adjusting their position. The bottles allow Morandi to talk about painting. The oak tree has become my bottles. Its scale is very different i can walk around it, climb it lie under it and kill it. The fact it is alive adds to the mystery. It is a contained system the visible leaves branches ect are fed by the root which is hidden. The neck like our own connects the body to the head, a shivering nervous system.

Francis Bacon talked of how painting could have a direct assault on the nervous system and said of Matthew Smith.

He seems to be concerned with paint that is, with attempting to make idea and technique inseparable; the brushstroke makes the form. I want to celebrate painting with these works by allowing paint to be paint. To allow paint and image to be one and part of each other. The mind connects thought which form the mass.

The painting unlike the tree is as dead as a marble bust and only lives in the minds eye or by touch.

The whole system of the tree seems so perfectly designed. I started thinking of Mondrian's transitional grey tree paintings. His journey from the landscape to primary colour abstractions and modernism.

"I construct lines and colour combinations on a flat surface, in order to express general beauty with the utmost awareness. Nature (or that which I see), inspires me, puts me, as with any painter, in an emotional state, so that an urge comes about to make something".

- Mondrian

I went back to the oak, pre-cubist, and made the Newton Oak Series - Six paintings from six points around the same oak tree.

Geoff Uglow 2013