Longer Term painting efforts. . . .

For a number of complicated reasons I recently went back to using oil paint. I seldom used oil paints as a student, though  I did do a number of oil paintings in the mid-1990s. However, for most of the 1990s and 2000s I was using various water-based paints including, watercolour, gouache, acrylics, and coloured inks. With these paints I produced paintings like this one from the early 1990s.

When I turned to more dimensional work I continued to use mostly acrylics. In my recent shadow boxes, acrylic paints just made more sense. I have been working on a very large shadow-box/Sculptor for over a year now and will unveil it in the next couple of months. Here is a photo of one of my previous ones. 

This box uses mostly acrylic paints, though there is also some pencil crayons - including the drawing in the centre which is a plain coloured drawing. 

However, these types of projects take a great deal out of me, both physically and emotionally. And to escape some of these travails, I have often turned to less ambitious and simpler, straightfoward 2 dimensional paintings. And it seems that my default work on such occasions is to do landscape/townscape paintings. I did quite a few of these in the 1990s in pure watercolour, and sold many of them. Here is one that still hangs in my studio. 

I don't know why I have always been attracted to such subjects. It must be in part because my dad, who was also an artist, loved British landscape painting and always had great books on painters like John Cotman and John Singer Sargent. I was enamoured by these painters. There is something remarkable and etherial about a really good landscape painting, and though they are seldom intellectually challenging, they are still a great art-form in my mind. 

In the mid-2000s, I started to do the occasional larger landscape painting in Acrylic and I enjoyed doing them. The typical result can be seen in this painting of Mont Saint Michel monastery in Normandy. 

Over time, I began to pursue what has proved a rather elusive ambition - to combine elements of basic landscapes with the elements of my other, more abstract and symbolic work. One of my more successful examples in this pursuit is this large painting (so large that I could not get a straight ahead photo of it). It is about 50 by 50 inches with the frame. 

Another example in which I tried to combine these two elements of my work can be seen in this painting. 

Thus far, I have never been entirely satisfied with the results of this endeavour. Furthermore, I began to feel that the acrylic paint was just too limiting, and that is one of the reasons that I turned back to oil. However, there is a significant learning curve in making this switch in media and for this reason I have been doing some smaller, straight landscapes as a form of practice. The process has been interesting and enjoyable. Here are a couple of these smaller paintings. 

These paintings stand on their own, but in a sense they are motivated by an effort to become more comfortable with the oil paint so that I can use it to continue my wider aesthetic ambitions. 

Updates on the effort will follow.