How time flies!

This has been quite a difficult time for me. I have a feeling that I often react to having a show this way, but it does seem to be a bit more intense this time. I've thought about it a lot, and I can't quite see why it affects me so much, because deep down I really don't care that much about what goes on when the paintings get put up. And yet it does affect me, so I don't think I can dismiss it all glibly.

I think it is probably the simple fact of going public for a short while that is disturbing, rather than the kind of response (or lack of any response, which is more to the point, especially this time round), that the work generates. Those (mostly my friends and relatives) who saw the show at the opening seemed responsive enough, but after that it was apparently a very quiet affair – with very few people tramping round the gallery. All of this is really not very important, but I find that I can't work easily after the show is over, and have lost the connection with the work which I had leading up to it.

Gradually, I'm getting back into painting again, but its a slow process. I've stopped doing the Generative Art course – it required much too much time and involvement at this stage, and I think would have been a distraction to my return to painting.

This is a small work I've started recently:

and I have started a couple of works on masonite, which I haven't painted on for years, and I find the surface quite interesting:

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The show is up at Watters Gallery, and I'm happy with the way it looks. The opening was fun – thanks to everyone who turned up (lots of relatives in Sydney, and old friends), specially Tony and Betsy who drove all the way from Maldon in Victoria to see the show.

Now its time to move on!

I've just signed up to a free course run by Monash University, on behalf of Futurelearn, which is an initiative of Open University UK. Its called Creative coding and it is about learning to code in a creative way to create…. well, creations! Its directed towards artistic production rather than practical, but the principles can be applied to a lot of different functions. They use a system called Processing, which I was not aware of before, but should have been, as its a fairly unique project based in Boston, UCLA and NYC. The IDE is built on Java and is all open source and ….. free! its surprisingly easy to use and get into graphic development.

Here's my first insignificant project – writing my name using a very simple codebase, which has been personally adapted (this is how the learning happens…)

What is most interesting to me is that the theory around the production of artwork in this way is very reminiscent of the kind of thinking behind the systems work I was doing back at St Martins in 1975-6, well before computers became widely available. They call this stuff Generative Art (though I'm not sure what kind of art isn't generative). I don't really like the indirectness of the process, as compared to painting (its more like printing in that sense), but it certainly throws up unpredictable results, and the range of images produced by the (thousands, it seems) of students doing this course is quite amazing.

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Threshold - 2015 - 46 x 41cm

My show at Watters approaches. The opening is next wednesday, and I will be driving up to Sydney with Barbara on Saturday with a cargo of paintings in the back of the car, ready for hanging on Sunday.

I've been very remiss in the last couple of months at writing anything on this blog. And now, I am beginning to feel a real need to write more in my ‘Story' section of this site, because the substance and appearance of my work continues to evolve, and I think I need to reflect on where its heading. I thought I would write something before the show, but now it feels like the wrong time to do that. The work is paramount, not the reflection on it. That can come later. If you can see the paintings on the walls of Watters Gallery, all the better.

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Opening at Watters Gallery on Wed 29th July at 6.00pm

Everyone welcome!

Watters Gallery

109 Riley St East Sydney NSW 2010

Rod's webpage on this show

Watters website

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Another painting started. The first stages were rather tentative and the result delicate:

I felt in some danger of trapping myself with a drawing which wasn't going to be easy to change. That would be fine if I was sure that the drawing was what I wanted, but I wasn't. The landscape feel that this drawing had seems to keep finding its way into my paintings but I don't think it's quite where I want to be right now. So my choice was to paint it over with white and start over, or to forge ahead and work over this painting with new marks and a new feeling. I decided on the second option and this is what happened:

The landscape has gone and there are just a lot of marks, not even forms yet. This looked a lot more open. After a few hours work it looks like this:

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