Rod McRae

Paintings

My painting story

9. Back to beginnings

2006-08

This one has much more of a drawn feel to it, because I was using mainly drawn elements to construct it. It just goes to show that the technique is pretty flexible and isn't in itself determining what the work is about or what it looks like. Computers are no different really from a palette and paintbrush. Two people will use them in totally different ways, which is wonderful.

One of the last computer images I've done was this, earlier this year. It uses the same Mantegna that I used in the earlier piece but combines it with a different work of mine. This one excited me a lot, maybe because of the kind of space that it generated, and which I felt I wanted to reproduce in painting.

However, when I painted it, and this is the painted version, the space changed quite dramatically. It wasn't what I'd wanted really, though I quite liked it in its own way. This is interesting, since it draws out the difficulty of deciding quite how far you want to go to get a particular result, or whether you can see something else emerge, that is different from what you intended, but which has its own qualities. What was really new for me here, in this painting, was the way I was using the paint, more like watercolour than oil paint, using lots of transparent medium and hardly any white. All the light comes from the underlying white canvas, and the colours start to glow in a way that I haven't achieved before.

But the fact that I'd lost the sense of space that I'd felt in the digital image, made me return to my intuitive drawing approach. So THIS painting didn't have any preconception in terms of the forms, but it DID have an aim in terms of the kind of space I wanted to depict. I felt, in the end, that it achieved more of the kind of space I had seen in the digital print than the first, direct working from the print, had done.

This is the digital image I used for the last painting I completed for the Watters show in October 2006. I was having another go at getting the kind of space I wanted in the painting, while still working from a preconceived image.

This is the painting that emerged — 'Firmament'. This was similar in its process to the previous painting 'Essence', in that I used very little white, so that it's more like a watercolor, and the darker areas are the most heavily worked. The light areas are what remains of the underpainting. It is that underpainting stage that interests me at the moment.

I began to be more and more enthusiastic about what had been happening in the early stages of the paintings I had been doing. In those early stages, there was a lot of accident and chance at play. In the later stages, I tended to tie the image down so that those aspects of chance became partly, or fully obliterated. Now I turned my attention to working on paper, and developing the early stages by working intensely but briefly on each piece, allowing those chance elements to be an integral part of the final image.

I was fascinated by the elements of chance and what they threw up. It was not arbitrary, however. I was looking for apects of the image in these works which had been lost in some of my paintings. Specifically, there was a sense of space which I had been desperately trying to achieve in painting, but which somehow got lost as I worked on and on over the canvas. But there was also something else emerging.

There was also an element of expressiveness that had been part of the early stages of each painting but which had been converted into something else during the working through of the images. This was new and exciting for me. I put together an exhibition of work on paper at Watters Gallery in 2007.

This new direction was mainly limited to work on paper at this time. I continued to start my paintings in the same intuitive loose fashion, but I also continued to work them through to a much more tightly controlled conclusion.