House paintings

During the COVID lockdowns I made several small model houses built from scrap cardboard, using cardboard boxes, cereal cartons and basically anything that came to hand. Indeed, the only money spent was on PVA glue. I built houses and barns making them strong by continually reinforcing with yet more cardboard glued into the internal structure. Recently in making paintings which were a progression of the field paintings of 2014 I started to include a certain amount of figuration to what was basically and loosely an abstracted landscape. Most of these paintings were small, dense and rather too tight for my liking and in thinking about actually doing something based on houses, with perhaps reference to the models I made, I wanted a looser and freer approach. Using larger canvases for the most part, than the previous recent painting I set out to draw using Prussian blue acrylic paint, a naïve rendition of houses within the framework of the painting. All the usual connotations regarding houses that we are familiar with came to the fore.  I wanted to see what I could make of a figurative rendition whilst retaining an abstract or semi dream like setting. The houses were painted from memory, imagination or both, which allowed a detachment from any reality, of an actual specific house to be utilized. Mostly separating each house from each other gave a certain sense of spatial mystery. Not exactly floating but then not grounded either, enigmatic. I am still exploring where this is all going, if anywhere and maybe some are destined to get painted over. It could take its own path or just provide a branch which will lead to another direction. 

The drawing of the houses is rather simplistic and naïve, intentionally so. It’s failing is that it can lead to a rather illustrative shallow appearance which I am trying to eradicate toward a more substantive image, yet still retaining simplicity, with a semi dream-like appearance (or something difficult to pin down). The adult child in me tries to leave aside all that I know, and have learned about how to produce artwork, for that which I do not know (which increases with age). Intuition but qualified by intention, idea.