This is a return gig with a poetry anthology, and I was given three poems to choose from. The one I went for is about urban decay and the awfulness of what’s left of industry, but ends with wildlife, trees and flowers taking over the area.
November 11th and we’re a few days on with a hiatus due to an RSI (repetitive strain injury) in my left arm. Totally desk layout related but of course it affects everything I would normally do with my dominant hand or even with both hands, including painting and posting updates.
Today it feels a little less fiery (imagine hot lasers shooting up and down your arm from your elbow every time you move) but also inconsistent in its effects. Yesterday I could lift a spoon ta dah! but not chop even soft fruit, today it’s the other way round.
Add to that a complete rearrangement of my desk to accommodate right-handed use of a tiny mouse which is the only sort that fits in my hand and is a hazardous implement at the best of time after so long using a graphics pad. And to prevent this happening again, there’s a compact keyboard on the way that makes it possible to site pointing devices closer to the centre, so reducing arm extension and rotation. We’ve all seen it – a colleague leaning to the side, arm outstretched in the other direction to a mouse that’s almost on the desk’s horizon.
Luckily, painting is a little easier. For all sorts of reasons, I’ve found I sometimes tackle a particular detail with my right hand without even thinking. Probably those times when you’d otherwise want to turn the painting upside down to get at something awkward. And because precision is less of an issue for me – go big, go grubby, is my rapidly developing motto! – it works.
14th November and I’ve been doing some serious mixing and matching, making marks on top of the acrylic base with both soft pastels and intense sticks. The new details revealed by textures drawn out by pulling these media across the paint has suggested new perspectives so, extending the surreal juxtaposition of various elements, I’ve drawn further into them with more from the poem.
This piece, which isn’t finished yet, epitomises my strategic lack of strategy in that I’ve learned to trust my imagination and as yet limited technique to build something from a raw idea. I have re-read the poem several times and wanted to include the key elements but without turning the painting into an all-you-can-eat poem menu. I began with the bridge in the centre. I’d found a photo of it, its arch now bricked over, a dead end; and the train that would have run on that line. I chose a photo of a coal transporter. Then there was the viaduct, a structure that often arches over valleys, of which there are many in Wales. Another photo reference. The docks are hinted at by the presence of water, some of it tumbling, some halfway to being waves; and the whole is permeated by green and yellow – the sun and the foliage that has replaced the abandoned buildings and toxic industry.
I could have given all of these a proper place with proper perspectives but that would have been a tad ordinary. Also, it would have meant creating a passably genuine Welsh landscape which is a very risky thing to attempt. I side-stepped it. More than a side-step in fact, a real glissade of a move – I surrealised it. So now the viaduct, positioned along the side of the train, has birds flying through it, and the water cascades down through its frame and onto what would be the track but is more the colour of vegetation. At the front of the train, the metal grill in the centre has become a track leading to a town lit orange by the fires of industry and blackened by soot in its skies. That was the past. I’ve tried to hint at rust on the metal and decay of paint work by scrubbing and scratching at those layers.
Then to the left and above the train, there is vegetation and water, boats and a clean blue sea. This is what the poem hints at, the replacement of desolation following the loss of jobs by hope with the renewal of life coming back to the area, bringing with it all its smells and sounds and natural chaos.
17th November. No more work on it but still trying to get a decent photo. There’s no gloss on this surface but ‘smart’ technology can’t help itself when it sees a large area with different registers, it just has to start evening things up.
Finally found a place where the light is just bright enough with LEDs behind the curtains, and the paintwork just soft enough to avoid triggering the camera into zazzing it all up. Bedroom wall, turns out. So, this is the submitted piece, cropped and tidied up a little round the edges in Paintshop Pro 2022.
It may or may not be used, or it may be cropped. The poem it was painted for is called ‘The Penrhos Branch Line’ by Nick Bowman; a very atmospheric piece that places past industrial glories in the context of urban decay and, finally, regeneration. I’ve called it Restoration. This post will be published when the book comes out unless I have permission to do so ahead of that time.
11th November 2023. It was used and I totally forgot about this post! Here it is:
SCH 2022/23
Strayfish Arts 