The longer daylight hours, as we progress towards midsummer, afforded a few moments early one evening to stop and examine this piece of found sculpture or installation (to add to my image collection) – something I have witnessed being constructed over the last few months. It’s a strikingly robust ‘builders’ intervention in the rural landscape; a construction seemingly put together for only practical purposes, but nevertheless it is visually and aesthetically harmonious, a textural mosaic of corrugated metal sheets… I trust that its collaborators will continue to add to it over the next few months; its future reconfigurement or final deconstruction, when viewed over the course of days or weeks, will be quite interesting to observe.
On closer inspection, any number of found paintings could be artfully composed with a camera…
all of which refer back to my ongoing farmscape paintings…
modularity will be my modus operandi…
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[Trinidad, mixed media on paper and canvas]
Trinidad has become the working title for this small abstract, as returned by an analysis of colour (read more about my colour values)… the stripes do seem to echo the colours of carnival, and the structures of the makeshift tin and brick settlements or shanty towns of the Carribbean, places which, despite their obvious veneer of poverty, still resonate with a resourceful and determined spirit.
This is the Laventille hills in the Port of Spain, Trinidad.
If one only chooses to see the poverty and crime associated with these supposed slum settlements of the Carribbean, then one would also miss out on witnessing the cultural homeland of carnival, calypso music, and the uplifting beats of steelpan bands…
…
Back in June 2003, I took this photograph of the neighbour’s old tin shed (which backed onto the boundary of our two gardens). Shortly after, the (then new) neighbour took down the delapidated shed. I remarked at the time that I quite liked seeing the rusty facade of the shed (from my side), to which he replied: ’ah, you must be an artist’.
However, the neighbour, being a resourceful diy type, re-used what was salvagable from the wreck, and parts of it later re-appeared as a boundary fence at the bottom of the garden. So, I am still able to marvel at the myriad colours of rust in the metal corrugation, a found painting that I can see day after day.
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