Rod McRae
Paintings
Paintings
I thought I would start a drawing off with some ink, to give me a fluid and intuitive background, over which I could work up a decent solid image in charcoal.
But when I finally got the paper stretched, and then applied some thin ink - it looked kind of good, and I wondered just how much I could improve it by drawing over all that lovely light texture. So I left it, and I still can't really decide - except that I think I will leave it for the moment and do another one, which I may have more success in following up with a charcoal drawing over the top. Or perhaps I shouldn't use charcoal here, but something more transparent, which will allow the original ink to show through. So I could use water color, or even more ink, or even seal it with acrylic and start painting with oil paint over the top. There's nothing wrong with using paper as a substrate for oil paint, as long as its well sealed. This is nice heavy cartridge too.
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Still working in charcoal on paper. This is looking more and more like the kind of drawing I was doing in the 1980s.
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I'm still working on both of these.
It will be interesting to see how this sort of subject matter turns out in a larger oil painting.
It might look like I haven't been doing anything since the last post, over a month ago now, but its not true!
I've been working on quite a lot of different things, in different media, including painting on canvas and board, drawing on paper, and working digitally on my samsung phone. Since this covers a fair bit of ground, I'll break this post up into subsections based on the date the illustrated works were photographed (which is usually when I do the artwork).
I'll make comments, if necessary, alongside the photos.
I can access this information from the painting diary that I keep for my own interest and record, which I'm much more likely to update regularly than this blog. Its all a bit academic really, but I lose track of where I am so quickly (forgetting over a week what I have done during that time) so this functions to keep my own progress under scrutiny, which is sometimes useful.
A small oil painting on canvas, which I started a few months back - and then just left for a while. It has been fun getting back into this kind of painting, where I can change anything quite quickly, and the forms just emerge out of abstract shapes. There is some of the drama of my black and white work, but also tinges of colour are emerging, as are some figurative elements.
I haven't worked much in my notebooks recently, but its always interesting to me when I do. I'm even less self-conscious here than on small-scale paintings, and I'm more prepared to leave things in a very indeterminate state.
This is a hybrid work, which exists only in a digital state. I photographed the early stage of a small painting (when it was rather pleasantly vague), and then imported it into my Autodesk Sketchbook app on the Samsung phone. The clearly developing figures were drawn over the top in a new layer on the phone. It's an amazing little device, with surprising flexibility in terms of drawing. I find it easier to use than a tablet.
Moving back to paper - this is a fairly large piece of cartridge. I started with an idea of making a background as in the hybrid work above, which I could then draw over physically this time. However, as is often the case, after starting it off, there was something quite attractive about the way the colour worked (this is painted with thin acrylics). And I haven't yet got round to the second stage of drawing over it. Maybe I never will!
Still working with paper, I tried a drawing on a piece of cartridge (500mm wide) with absolutely no idea what I wanted it to be at the start. What emerged is clearly in line with what is happening in my work anyhow, ie. a figurative space that harks back to work I was doing in the nineteen eighties (see, for example, the painting "Sea"), but which I haven't seriously revisited since. Interesting!
This one was more deliberate, with the figurative "hubs" distributed across the space, using a lot of diagonals to create a dynamic feeling. This needs a lot more work but it continues the trend. 
Back to the phone, and I tried drawing, again from scratch (without clear directions) in the same way that I worked on the drawing on paper above. The marks are less interesting than the analogue ones that you get putting charcoal to paper, but its still a good way of trying out ideas.
Finally, this little painting grew out of the one below it, another intuitive sketch where the elements develop out of abstract marks and lines.
These posts have been rather rare recently, but I have been continuing to work in the studio, mainly on paintings, some of which are older ones that have been sitting in the attic or shed for years.
This is the one I restarted a few months ago (see post of 09 May 2019), called "Seethe" and dated on the back 2010, which I don't believe ever got shown in an exhibition, but which I always liked. However, I still feel it could still benefit from some more work, and that is what I've been doing. 
And I've also been working on this one, which is even older. Its not dated but I reckon I must have done it back in the early 1990s. I found it in the attic gathering a lot of dust, but now it seems to have a new life!
Over the period since my last post, I have continued to reexplore some older work, or, more explicitly, continued to explore a previous way of working and an attitude towards paint handling which I have partly left on one side over the last couple of years. I'm sure I will come back to making objects, and using found materials that express a certain kind of anti-art feeling, but for the moment, I want to paint on canvas, with oil paints and just see where the intuitive drawing process leads me. I enjoy it. And now that I feel free of gallery constraints, I am going to enjoy this phase as much as I can.
Here are a couple of things I've been working on (or over - some were started quite a while ago, and have been waiting for me to pick them up again since then):
This last one, I'm working on right now, and its certainly not finished. However, I can't really say that any of them are finished yet. This is a process. The 'objects' that are the paintings emerge slowly over time
I decided to switch quite sharply back into a mode of painting from some years back. The way I engineered this was by starting to rework an older painting. Its one that I always liked, but looking at it now, I can see the potential for taking it a stage further. This is how it looked before I started working on it again:
and this is how it looks today:
(Click images to enlarge)
After playing around some more with Cinelerra, I produced a little animation.
Its pretty minimal, but there's lots of potential here!
Click this image for link to Vimeo and my animation: 
I've put some more images of work done over the last couple of years (2017 to now) on my pCloud space, which you can access from here:
The images are collected in folders.
Clicking a folder will show a page of thumbnails. Click a thumbnail and use the arrow keys for next, and previous images. Or view as a slideshow.
Use the back button of your browser to return here
Explore!
I can't seem to get away from this dada stuff. The more I look at objects like these, the more I like the way that they aren't really part of any 'aesthetic' than I'm aware of (I don't see dada, by the way, as an aesthetic exercise). And yet that's exactly how they work for me, as objects that have some kind of strange beauty, and where that comes from, I am quite puzzled. They are certainly distanced from, and at the same time, they stretch, my own aesthetic tendencies (which I don't really trust, as it happens).
Back:
and front:
This is what its all about for me. Fossacking around in what often feels like a muddled state, and suddenly coming across the most surprising things.
Putting together some images of small work I've done recently with other odds and ends around me here in the studio, I'm beginning to develop a line of constructions which is heading off in a different direction (more on this later...):
and some more dada:
I started this painting quite a while ago, before Christmas, but I got back into it again, and I'm quite pleased with the way its going:
Sometimes I start off a painting, maybe just a small work on board like the following two images, intending to work it through thoroughly. In other words, the first stage is supposed to be a preparation for something more layered. And then, if I don't go ahead immediately, I stop and wonder if there is not something quite wonderful about that early stage, and I want to leave it for a while, and look at it again. Because once I start working over it, the original soft image, which was never meant to be complete, is gone, and I feel quite uncomfortable, even sad, about that.
I started a new painting on canvas, with a black ground. Its a reasonable size at just over a metre wide.
The image was based, very roughly on this drawing I did on my phone:
The next three images show my progress over a couple of days:
I'm not quite sure where to go from here with this. Its a little bit extraordinary for me, both in the colour and the application, and of course the content.
Whereas the original drawing was almost entirely abstract, this painting is developing some spaces that suggest objects and even landscape (again!).
I'm not too bothered by that, but I will leave this to one side for a while and think more about what I might do here.
