One of the advantages of not putting stuff up on this site too frequently is that when I come to review the images of what I have done recently, I can start to see what is more or less interesting. That's frequently not the case on a day to day basis.

While I'm still doing 2 dimensional work on small boards and canvases, such as the image below

I've also restarted working with newspaper stiffened with acrylic and painted, more or less, with black paint (acrylic). Sometimes, the photography of these things, by distorting the context and scale, opens up new possibilities for me.

Other times, the situation of the object when I photograph it also expands possibilities

or, combining a 2d work (painting on canvas in this case) with a new paper object, or two:

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A very small canvas:

A larger canvas:

A construction in newsprint on canvas:

Three small acrylic drawings on board:

A drawing on my Samsung phone:

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Returning to video work in Cinelerra. Seems ages since I did any of this! One small snippet of a movie to start with…
View at Vimeo: click here: New video

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I haven't written in the blog for a while, but I have been steadily getting to grips with some new work, and it seems time now to get some of that onto this website.
Here are some of the works I've been doing, mostly small (some VERY small!). Some are finished and some are not.

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Now that the show is well and truly over, I need to kickstart this website.
This means starting off my blog again, and finishing off a new page for the Watters show itself, with all the work photos and so on, which is quite a task. I'm well into that, however, and should have something up soon. Since I'm redoing the WAY that I write the website, the new page might look a little bit different in format from the others, but eventually all that will be ironed out. The content should work fine, though.

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My last show at Watters is approaching. Its the last show because Watters is sadly closing down at the end of 2018. I will be having a survey show in the ground-floor part of the gallery, and showing recent work upstairs. Its been a bit of a challenge for me, mainly fathoming out how to show the recent work in the way that best fits it. The last few months have been a time of process and experimentation, so I want to get across some of that dynamic element to the work. However, a gallery is a gallery (as opposed to a studio) and its not necessarily the appropriate environment for expressing continuous change and experiment. I have a lot of work to put in, which is in itself challenging, but also, not all of the work is so extremely dynamic and experimental. Everything needs to have the appropriate attention and pulling it all together isn't easy.

I will certainly include some of the slightly strange objects that have emerged recently. Whether to present them sitting on a flat surface (which is how I have had them in my studio over the past months)

or to hang them on a wall, scattered in such a way as to draw attention to the space of the wall and the interaction between the pieces (which is a much more difficult thing to achieve) is still an open question for me.

I will probably end up doing some of each of the above. I want to keep in mind that this is just the beginning of a phase of work which could end up going in various directions. Only by working more (and this is not really the time to be doing that) will I work out properly which directions are more interesting.

One thing that has come out of this process, is that I'm returning to my website and finishing off some of the parts that need it. I haven't posted anything in this blog for a while, and over the past few months its been sporadic. So here I am… engaging once again.

I want to create a new page that includes images of most of the work that will be in the show. It will be provisional, because some decisions are made only at the time of hanging.

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I've made some changes to the website, splitting up the Shows page, because it was taking too long to load the images. Hopefully, this won't be too obvious, and I think it now works better.

In the studio, I've mostly been working on framing some of the ink drawings. I'm also thinking about the presentation of the many small objects I have made over the last year or so. Putting them together creates a whole new set of potential resonance and meanings. How they end up is almost not the point at all. It is the manipulation of them and what happens along the way (more like a little adventure than a finished product). This is why photography is so important for me just now, because I can capture moments where the things just set each other off in interesting ways.

Thinking this through leads to an idea that I could create little dramas that would be embodied in digital stories rather than physical constructions. However the physicality of these objects (however roughly made) is still quite engaging, so I won't stop working with actual, physical materials yet.

Lastly, I've closed down my Facebook page. It is all part of a grand plan to divorce myself, as much is possible, from the tentacles of the huge and ominous tech companies (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) which I truly believe are threatening both our privacy, culture and politics in unprecedented ways. More on this later …

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I've started back on the ink drawings and am also starting to combine some of the 'objects' that I've been creating over the past year or so into sort of constructivist sculptures. Its all heading for the show I've got lined up for the end of February in 2018.

Here are the constructions:

and here are the ink drawings from today:

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I'm now working on more drawings in ink, trying to work with a slightly larger format than the tiny works in my notebooks, but with similar kinds of marks and content.

At the same time, I'm also expanding the exploratory work in 3D, using rougher materials like newspaper, and a rougher approach to content also. I feel like these two ends of the spectrum could come together at some stage. How exactly that might work out is still in the early stages of development.

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Just realised that I hadn't uploaded the pictures for this page of the blog. Which makes it pretty dull (and mostly meaningless). So I've put that right.
I have also put on the videos where the links were missing.

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Starting to put my blog archives onto this website. So far, got back to 2014, but won't be long before I complete all the pages back to 2008.

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This website is now public! (which is probably why you are here)
AND I have transferred my domain name to point here too, ie. www.rodmcrae.com, or http://rodmcrae.com (or just rodmcrae.com in your browser header) will get you here.
The biggest task remaining for me to transfer everything over from Wordpress is to complete the archives of my blog, which go back to 2008. Since this won't be of much interest to most people, I will complete it without rushing.

I also need to update the "Story" page, which lags current work by several years.
That's a much bigger task, since it involves assessing exactly what the work has been about!

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I'm about to make the website public, though I don't think I'll be sending out invitations quite yet. I also have to transfer my domain name from Wordpress, but that can also wait for a while longer

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First blog entry on my brand new website (so brand new that its not even public yet).
Despite having a virus which is reducing all my energy for painting, I worked in the studio today and, for my trouble, produced this rather strange piece of work:

There is a lot of work to do to transfer older posts that I've written, both on my own website and on Wordpress. But I don't see that as a reason to neglect to write new posts as I gradually get all the old stuff online.

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Working simultaneously on some quite varied subject matter. In the ink drawings over glossy white acrylic, there are definite moves towards figuration. Meanwhile, the painted structures (here, using various discarded packaging) are more ambiguous. The bits of original material (cardboard, clear acrylic plastic) lend a ready-made or constructivist feel. The marks are tantamount to graffiti.

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