Painting Outside.

The first plein aire pictures I made were for Walkerloo.  They were back drops for my portable paper soldier army on tour.  

10 years later I painted views of my garden for my mothers birthday.  They all now hang on her wall and she loves them.

Throughout the summer of 2021 making the picture 'Les Trois Ages du Dragon Baligan' I painted daily but when the project finished I missed the brush wiggling activity.  

Since leaving University I've made most of my money painting houses.  When I moved to France I did a weekly oil (but with acrylics!) painting course at the local art school.  My first paper soldiers were coloured using marker pens which was at first straight forward but I found the fixed colour range  restrictive and expensive!  So  I began to paint the soldiers with a set of gouache I'd bought for the painting course.  Mixing new colours with paint and developing brush techniques to make convincing pictures feels magical.

Taking my goats onto the hillside one beautifully mild morning in December 2021 I decided to get my paints and join them beneath the bright blue sky.  I posted the painting on the Instagram account I'd begun using after a visitor's suggestion during my Dielette studio.  

Over the next few months I began making a couple of outdoor paintings a week spending 5 or 6 hours in the lanes and fields around my home in still concentration was wonderful.  

In the Spring of 2022 scoping properties for my Isigny mission I decided to paint my chosen location.  Over the 5 months of "Au Monstre D'Isigny" as a means of engagement with the town and it's people I made over 50 plein aire paintings.  

Returning from Isigny I continued to go out and paint a couple of times a week.  

Painting outside is wonderful.   You have to be quick if you want to catch a particular scene. Especially if the suns out.   I've lived next to the sea for more than 20 years but until then I'd never tried to paint it.

'Les Trois Ages du Dragon Baligan, myTHself et Autres Monstres' Opening Show Night. Batiment Bleu, Dielette, 27th Oct , 2021.

I talked a few thousand people around my temporary studio space over my 4 month residence in Dielette. Few of the visitors came to see my work specifically.  Most approached a painter working on a large painting in a large open window out of curiosity. I would explain the picture as I worked and often invite them on a tour of my work inside the space.  It proved an excellent way to evolve a lyrical talk around my pictures.

As LesTroisAgesDuDragonBaligan painting reached completion I planned an exhibition to mark the end of my residence.  For the exhibition I identified five picture 'stations', stops on a mythical journey through the exhibition space.  

On the opening night I performed the tour around the pictures before an invited public including the Port Captain and the Mayor.  It was a mythical journey that invoked myTHself Trinity.

Station 1: The Easter Legs. The first public project I made after moving to France. A Christmas Stocking meets an Easter Egg in a Gift Factory on St. Valentines night (animated film).  The offspring of this mythical union of the best selling Christmas gift and the best selling Easter gift should be able to merchandise the *uck out the rest of the planet.... right?  But a tension exists within the group...  (after almost 20yrs live play action www.EasterLegs.com is under threat of tech extinction.  Ever since S.Jobs denied Flash in his pods etc. hmmm... the same Jobs who sat on the Disney board after he sold them Pixar in 2006... an obvious conspiracy against the EasterLegs in the flash... ?

Station 2: The Battle Of Walkerloo. A self portrait in the form of a toy soldier army fighting a real pretend war for survival.  Ever since StarWars boys action toys in particular have been in the grip of the plastic toys from movies and TV.  What else should an army of toy soldiers do to get on in the world but go to real pretend war with those that obstruct and occupy the relevant space.

Station 3: The Tale Of Christopher Wanker.  Over the summer it this was this picture that got visitors embarrassed attention. Fair enough. It is a picture made to project so. But always as I talked people through 'The Tale Of Christopher Wanker' and the origins of his phallus the trepidation turned to understanding, giggles and smiles.  At the origin of  myTHself, the word I made up to author the picture. Christopher Wanker the Fantasy Banker, his cock is London's cock as I discovered it to be upon pasting my bedroom/office walls with a pair of giant scale road atlases to visualise library gleaned road haulage company data in the making of my business plan that was to make me a millionaire advertising media mogul... SMACM (strategicMobileAdvertisingCampaignMedia) ... or not. SMACM de-AD(vertising)... hmmm. West End, East End, Bell End? Londong? Oh that's why they're all called Cockneys.... I no longer wanted to be a real business man... but a part of me had already become a fantasy one... Christopher Wanker the Fantasy Banker has been with me ever since.... my toxic male alter-ego? my biggest swinging get the business done self? the holder of my tool for mass cultural penetration and insemination...

Having explained 'The Tale Of Christopher Wanker' I begin to back up to that wall behind me where my suit jacket and Britain map wings are hung.... and then.... ... ... ... the invocation of myTHself Trinity, le duelliste d'Isigny is complete!

Station 4: Les Trois Ages Du Dragon Baligan. Man vs Beast... using the power of faith and its symbols. The picture shows St.Germain surfing into Diélette on his flaming wagon wheel (nuclear warning adjusted Raleigh Burner wheel) and petrifying the child eating dragon beast Baligan beneath the cliffs of Flamanville... as I myTHself Trinity go on to tell the story of how another child preferring dragon beast Disney is gonna get it... using the power of my faith.... and my pictures

Station 5:  La Bataille d'Isigny Strategic Model.  (LBdISM).  An Improvised object coming together days before the show.  I needed a pictorial object to introduce and link the studio space in Dielette and further my mission to manifest an assault on Disney...  "In 1066 Hugues Suhard d'Isigny a peasant soldier left Normandy in the army William the Bastard to seek his fortune. 900 years later in 1966 one of Hugues descendants died in California leaving behind a commercial empire that had begun to capture the imagination of the world, he was Walt Disney. The Battle of Isigny strategic model enabled me to explain my surreal assault on the corporate beast via the ancestral hometown of foes creator.

Friend and picture making collaborator Martin Andrieux/ManCameraMartain along with a few others agreed to film and photo the event. These stills from his films and photos of others present at the show.

the dream of the battle... to cum?

Les Trois Ages Du Dragon Baligan

My first full sketch for the picture was in blue biro.  

amalgamating the two left panels the first full size sketch was in charcoal

It's been a cool summer with changeable weather

The space has no electricity.  To make best use of the light my back is to the window whilst working. I arranged my larger paintings about the walls for display and gave tours when people were interested.  I find painting a picture in public with a subject understood by that public both gratifying and motivating.  If the painted picture is a tired old media object, painting the picture in public is vital.  On the street art.

 A journalist for Ouest France was covering a yacht race back in early July.  He talked to me about my project, recorded the conversation and took a couple of pictures to make the short article below.

 

I had initially envisaged beginning the picture in April so as to finish in high summer when the port is busiest.  It was mid June when I actually began the painting and port visitors were already beginning to flow past my painting space.  I had imagined a much looser painting keeping more of the improvised lines of the early sketches.  But I lost some of this play in the final painting.  A cost of public performative painting was a defendable popular, illustrative and so easy-readable and explainable style.  

Throughout the day I would explain the story of the picture to general public both familiar and not with the legend and industrial projects depicted.  One Sunday afternoon I talked to two concrete workers from the nuclear construction site for an hour about my pictures and art.  After presenting my work to a family an 8 year old girl excitedly reported to her father 'being in that gallery was like being in that man's head'.