Tide Turn, Solway

Commissioned by Higham Hall College, Bassenthwaite for their music performance room in 2021 during the Covid 19 pandemic when the college was closed.

Commissions like this take a lot of planning: discussions with the client about the idea and the mood of the piece depending on what purpose it serves in the room allocated for it; the research drawing (in this case three trips to the Solway coast in the autumn in very different kinds of weather and different states of the tide); the design work in the studio to imagine a brilliant composition and generate new ideas; the construction of a large stretched canvas support and priming; and finally the execution of the painting itself. When it comes to this final stage, I like to feel that I’ve done enough preparatory drawing work that it flows along quite quickly but often, if it’s going well, it will take on a natural life of its own, each day moving the work on so that the following day the work suggests new possibilities enabling improvisations based on one’s feeling for place and painting.

This is quite a complex and mysterious process, like alchemy turning base materials into gold. The risk is that one never quite resolves the problem of composition, colour interaction and feeling, constantly reviewing and changing the work in the hope that one might make a revelatory break-through. It is as though the painting is a living thing beyond oneself with its own needs yet dependent on you as a maker, a worker, to breathe life into it. This is why one has to rest the work at some point, put it out of sight and come to it fresh as if one had just seen it for the first time and react to it with more conviction.

I don’t think large works like this are ever really finished, but there comes a point when you can’t think of anything else to do, other than scrap it entirely and start all over a again - a policy that, notoriously, Frank Auerbach practices on a daily basis by scraping all the paint off at the end of a day of thick, heavy painting and starting over the next day until intuitively, like the game of Mornington Cresent, the work is somehow complete - or accept that it is indeed finished and should be handed over.

So, for anyone considering commissioning an artist, consider this: the artist’s primary responsibility is for the artwork and this is more important than his/her/their accountability to the commissioner. This was Michelangelo’s attitude in painting both the Sistine Chapel ceiling and end wall and Leonardo’s in painting the Last Supper, to name but two commissioned works of art.

End note. However successful the artist might feel his/her/their creation is once installed what happens next is beyond their control. Some works remain in-situ for years until the building is altered or demolished/destroyed. Some are moved to another space for which the work was not designed. Some are given away and lost when the building changes hands and some are stolen. None of these events are within the control of the artist, so whatever ambition one has for the work and how it works in the intended space, the rest is down to history. All these things have happened to my work.