Rod McRae
Paintings
Paintings
2008-10
Nevertheless I was allowing some elements of the initial painting phase to remain visible. An example is this painting, where, at an early stage I have painted with acrylic over an oil undercoat, which produced a particular effect that appealed to me and I have incorporated this into the final image.
I was still trying to get a sense of openness in the space of the paintings which I had found when working on paper. Gradually, I was leaving out more of the detail that had been present before. But I was still struggling with these images... that space did not come easily!
An alternative approach to opening up those spaces by painting out the detail was to leave the painting at an earlier stage of completion. This was difficult for me to do. In this painting I have restrained myself from completing a lot of details. While it has a more muddled appearance in some respects, it is clearly indicating my desire for more looseness and expression. With that comes a change in the potential for emotional charge.
Finally, I found myself able to leave a painting at a stage which had all the characteristics of the loose drawings on paper, and which I had been struggling to achieve in a painterly way on canvas. I did some other paintings in this manner, but 'Wolf light' was a complete breakthrough for me, being on a larger scale. It was satisfying that the emotional power of the work was in an inverse relationship to the degree to which it was worked through. It was a deliberate approach, but the result was still a shock to me.
Recently, I have completed two even larger works that are operating in the same regions of perception and feeling. Working on this scale with the looseness that I desire is challenging. I started working on this painting on the floor, but had to finish it upright because I couldn't easily reach all areas of the canvas.
With the experience of the last painting, I did not attempt this one in a horizontal plane, but worked on it upright from beginning to end. Not surprisingly, this gives it a certain drawing quality that is not always so evident when the process is more organic while working on a painting on the floor.
Over the last couple of years, I have continued to explore issues which emerged from some of the painting work which I have just described. Much of the impetus has come from working on paper, where I feel that my connection with natural processes engendering some aspects of the resulting work is stronger.
What occurs when I start one of these works on paper is more unpredictable than ever. I make decisions as I go along, based on the events which are unfolding. All history is upredictable to an extent, but natural history is particularly intriguing. The forms that emerge through natural forces are both different from, and related to, planned artistic endeavour.
We are, after all, part of the nature that surrounds us. Its just that we often forget it, and start believing that we have more control than is really the case. Ironically, when aspirations to that control are abandoned, then new freedoms (and the power to create new forms) can be generated.
I get most satisfaction in this work when the results totally confound my traditional attitudes to composition and meaning. This is slightly weird, considering that I have spent a lot of time worrying about just those attributes of a painting. I filmed the work shown above as I was doing it and you can see the video via the following link to Vimeo (opens in a new browser tab):
Video of Work on paper
This is an example of an image that seems to have meaning of its own that is not of my making. Perhaps the video of the process throws light on how this happens.