Ever since I spent a night doing prep work for the Runnymede memorial painting I'll be showing you shortly, I have been badgering away trying to work out my response to how the landscape in general and trees in particular change at night. This is Nash's.
I know exactly how I want my work to look but I haven't yet uncovered a medium which ticks every box. I've considered drawing and printing and photography and different types of painting and even papercraft and none of them tick every box. Frankly, its driving me up the wall! There is a very different sort of physicality, almost an anti-physicality, that I want the work to have. Nash's drawing reveals the other-worldliness of trees at night but in itself is worldly. I want the work itself to belong in the same, altered place as the trees. I want the infinitely deep colours of paint, the precision of drawing, the slick textureless-ness of photography and the "what the hell's that?" quality of printing or of subtle tricks made of paper.
When the moon is fuller and the skies are clear I'll spend another night on the mead and a night at Ankerwycke as that should be fascinating in the dark. That will give me enough raw material, but it still doesn't solve the more fundamental problem.
I think photography is the front-runner at the moment. There are concerns. The fundamental one is that deep down I view photos as informing my painting instead of being an end in their own right. Perhaps what I need to do is go through the process of drawing and painting and then go back out to take photographs informed by the paintings. I have a lot of thinking and doing to work through, but I am excited by what I'm holding in my head; I will find a way to let it out.
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