Mark Making to focus on Painting inspired by Peter Doig

Concrete Cabin II (1992) Peter Doig

The question of surface, combined with the closer examination of mark making and it's processes, has opened up other possibilities for my practice. Rather than restricting myself to the ink on paper approach which is a process I had wanted to experience from the beginning, in some respects steered by my own expectations of an illustration course, I now feel I can be freer in my materials.  

This includes the use of colour and the actual process of the mark making.

I have begun a series of paintings based upon the crow theme and one of my inspirations for this move is the work of Peter Doig. His painting process uses film and an element of narrative to form colour cinematic landscapes and it is the landscape that I will be working with  as this is where the poems of Hughes, and the narratives I'm illustrating, are set. I will be examining the processes of Doig and how he gathers materials to build up his paintings.

In an interview with Richard Shiff the artist Doig says this about his process:

"I made, you can't call them films, moving moments of walking towards the building through the trees with a video camera and then I took stills from those and the stills actually were far more accurate, as to the way you actually see the building, than a still photograph taken when you're standing still. A still from a walking motion, looking and walking."

Crow's Fall I - work in progress Toby Lattimore

What Doig is saying is the actual process of filming something engages with the movement that he hopes the viewer will engage with when looking at the painting. Rather than posing a shot the still that is captured from the moving moment, that he uses to etch or paint from, is embodied by the cameraman and we see as if from that person's eyes. Perhaps this makes it more real.

These images of my painting show that I'm now engaging with a landscape, one that I walked, experienced and photographed, and the environment of the crow where his exploits are set. Ted Hughes very much wrote from within the landscape, an environment that he understood from his own experiences and one I want to express.