New Work: Nocturnes

Its time to call a temporary halt to my beautiful nightmare: considering the term nocturne's musical heritage perhaps I shall call it an interval.

I have loved making these, I think I could work on more for many months yet to come. They are strange - easy on the hands but incredibly difficult on the judgement. The hand and brush skills required are minimal but the everything else is demanding. When you are working within such a tiny tonal range then the way every mark catches the light, the sharpness or softness of every edge, the tiny differences in colour, the opacity and transparency of every glaze or impasto, the relative glossiness of each passage, the way the texture of the canvas is emphasised or disguised and a thousand other subtleties take on a disproportionate importance because they are the only way the space, the light and the looming quality of the landscape can be indicated. They are the hardest things I have done, and I am a better painter for having made them.

So far there are six. Two show the full moon in relation to the bushes that grow along the riverbank here, the square one barely shows the Thames itself reflecting back the inky sky. All of these three are dominated by the street lamps of either the M25 or Englefield Green which, although they are out of sight, are close enough to stain the sky near the horizon as if with a permanent, artificial sunset. The other three explore the impact of car headlights. In one they are blinding, in another they slash the world in half but at the same time help give form to it and in the third they are less dominant and give glimpses of the surrounding trees.

There are two larger ones yet to be started related to these, and three more which are just a gleam in my eye at this stage which will look at the way mist rises across the meadow. I'll freshen up with something else a little more autumnal before I make those though.

I know you must be sick of me bemoaning the difference between a painting and a photograph of that painting, especially given my tendency to build paintings from multiple layers of transparent paint, but never has it been truer than here. The plan is to show them in Guildford in January; coming and seeing them is the only way to understand the subtlety. I may put close-ups up here at some point to give you a chance, but I've gone on enough for one day!

A what if about Whistler

I was coming home last night and cut across the meadow. The moon was rising and so was a mist so I nipped back out again with my camera; I'm really enjoying grappling with my own Nocturnes so the more raw material the better. The mist did beautiful things to the street lamps and headlights on the bypass in the first photo and conjured light seemingly out of nowhere across the whole width of the meadow in the second - the light on the right is from the entrance to the duty free warehouse and the light on the left is from the bypass and even though they are hundreds of metres apart the mist has managed to draw them together. The light on the horizon is a house just on the brow of the hill.

I can't help but wonder what Whistler would have made of modern digital cameras and the ability to capture fleeting effects of colour and light so effortlessly. Would he just revel in the joy of it and lose his discipline? Would he be frustrated at the limitations of the kit and the distortions in colour, shape and space photography inevitably introduces? Would it just be a way to gather information for paintings, a companion to the sketchbook and a prompt to the memory? Or would he find a way to elevate the medium to new heights? Of course there's no knowing and the same questions could and should be asked about Monet and Degas and many others, but speculating about it is an intriguing way to while away five minutes.

Whistler: Nocturne in Grey and Gold, Westminster Bridge

I've spent a lot of time over the last 6 weeks developing some night paintings so, now that the first ones are probably done and I've found my way to make them, I wanted to have a look at other people's approaches. Whistler is the obvious place to start. His friend, Frederick Leyland, started describing them with the musical term "Nocturne" and it makes sense as Whistler's Nocturnes are about evoking a mood and enjoying colour for colour's sake, albeit within an incredibly restricted and de-saturated palette - in other words they operate in the same way as music. Some of the Nocturnes were a lot more colourful than this one because they were set at dusk or dawn or featured fireworks but I've chosen this one as it is one of the purest ones. I love its stillness, its restricted palette and the way the far bank of the river indicates a focal point but that focal point is just a blur - the viewer's eye finds no rest there and keeps on moving. It takes an effort on the part of the viewer to make their eyes as still as the painting. In spite of its games and its uncompromising approach it does pick up the character of the Thames at night when the water is at its stillest.

I've never been a huge Whistler fan, but I suspect that's because he was all about subtle and delicate colour and I've mostly seen reproductions rather than originals. A glance at this lovely little thing is all it takes to see that one has to view the original to really appreciate it; I guarantee the colours which are all but absent from the reproduction will breathe and change before you. It turns out its in the Burrell collection I blogged about a few weeks back. A trip to Glasgow is definitely in order.