At the beginning of the year, I was invited by Black Swan Arts in Frome to stage an exhibition in their Round Tower Gallery, a unique stone-walled, circular space, that was originally built in the eighteenth for drying fabric. I knew instantly that I did not want the show to be a predictable resumé of all the work I’d done so far. Rather, I found it more appealing to imagine how the gallery would look if it were filled with bright, shiny new paintings, in a medium I was unfamiliar with. And then I took the idea a stage further. A dozen new paintings, I could imagine that easily, but what about one hundred? If I worked solidly from May to November, painting abstracts, still-life, portraits, landscapes and everything in between, what would my one hundredth painting look like? And what kind of painter would I have become?
I chose six slow-drying acrylic colours (including black and white), I bought pots of moulding paste and pumice gel and ordered one hundred canvases. Each one was to be just 30 x 30 cm square, about the size of a vinyl album sleeve.
I painted my first picture in early May:
Thinking of carrots and sticks and Cezanne’s words:
“The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed, will set off a revolution.”
The revolution did not come, so I painted another carrot and then I hit a snag, in the form of painting holidays and nine weeks in France and Italy.
It was quite a nice problem to have; I worked with so many wonderful people, both at l’Age Baston and Studio Paradiso, but it meant that on my return, if I was to meet my November deadline, I would have to paint at the rate of one and a half pictures per day.
I thought of Turner and the twenty-four thousand watercolours he painted in his lifetime. And I thought of Van Gogh and the eighty masterpieces he produced during the eight months he spent in Arles with Gaugin.
“Inspiration is born of hard work and not the other way around,” said Stanislavski.
If you’re curious to know what the one hundredth painting looks like:
IMAGE WALL
A personal journey in 100 canvases, painted between May and November 2010
The Round Tower Gallery
2 Bridge Street
Frome
Somerset BA11 1BB
Tel: 01373 473 980
27 November to 24 December (please visit Black Swan Arts website for opening times).
And if Frome is simply too far away, I’ll post the image soon on http://theimagewall.blogspot.com
“This is my way of holding onto things. Friction against the slippery slope of modernity; smooth as a flat screen TV, you can touch but not feel. Painting slows us down, but makes us more alive; opens a window on a world full of possibilities and entirely free of interruptions from our sponsor. Jawlensky described art as nostalgia for God. It's taken me 100 canvases to understand what that meant.
Painting and longing are one and the same.”
Chandler 2010
