[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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two of my farmscapes… [december 2009]
and two of my photographs… [march 2008]
all images courtesy of the artist…
it doesn’t hurt to give some credit to the original sources…
…
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bruised rouge, to grey
clodded clay,
clawed deep, the way…
[another saltscape] 15cm x 15cm, one of 25 works in progress on for the salthouse contemporary art exhibition 2009…
i am not a poet but i quite like poetry… i won a poetry prize at school but the careers officer said if i really wanted to be a writer i had to study journalism… i once signed up to a creative writing workshop, but came away disillusioned after a day’s workshop on plot development and characterisation… the more said with less appeals… an economy with language, painting the scene with single words, not gilding with ornate prose… perhaps there is something good to come out of the texting phenomenon; in time we will all become poets, communication condensed, a poetry in nano…
i have debated whether or not these panels should be hung together to look as a series of landscapes… implied historical narratives seem to be a big part of the exhibition… but i have a reasoning behind a current preference for stripes, horizontal or vertical… i am reminded of barcode images, maps, of extracted dna, information refined for analysis, visually coded, simplified data… i realised that the stripes were in some way linked to a need to condense, compartmentalise, tidy up collected and stored visual information, putting things in order, creating an essense out of the apparent mess of things…
p.s. a gentle plug for the HWAT website which i have been working on…. my involvement in a local art trail [artists' open studios]… these artworks [saltscapes i-xxv] will not be on show as by then they will be installed at salthouse church…
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