Furnace

Earlier this year I did a live painting performance at the Furnace (see March blog) This was a venture into collaborative work with some musicians and the energy of an audience. The experience was about the process of working in that scenario, not the end product as a work of art.

 

Last Sunday I collected the canvas from where it was being stored with the idea to re-visit what was initiated through the performance concept; to invade perceptually that physical field of marks and memories, and push it further.

 

The heart of the Furnace community is a space for collaborative exploration across disciplines; where art forms can converse to create new experiences of engagement. Not just art forms in a formal sense, although that is a vehicle, but essentially an interchange of creative spirit, of human sharing. That is my experience of it,  and I’d like to be able to do justice to that vision whilst having taken the canvas away from the epicentre for quiet reflection and further work. My motivation for this is that community and solitude are part of a wider whole both feeding and enriching each other. We need both. I’d like to marinate the experience in some silent after-party reflection.

 

So I placed the canvas in the garden to see the effect of its shape on the landscape.

 

 

and I noticed the natural light upon the surface colours.

 

 

I liked the thought of painting with natural light on acrylic on canvas which began to add a new dimension to marks already made.

 

 

I sensed the marks forming their own landscape in tune with the surroundings

 

 

 

I then divided the canvas into four parts…

 

 

This subsequent cropping has yielded some compositional possibilites from the original free flow of marks.

 

 

 

 

 

Next I will live with them for a while and consider where to go from here.