some new images

Thinking about my next paintings

My next painting will look some thing like this. I'm going to loosely base them on this idea I've created on Photoshop from my previous paintings. I want to start going for earthy reds and golden colours, creating warmth, but still using dark rich colour. It fits with the landscape up by my studio too, barren moorland.

Statement for Newbloodart.com

Geoffrey Oke lives in Aberystwyth and has recently completed an MA in Fine Art at Aberystwyth School of Art. His recent work suggests landscape, but doesn’t attempt to describe it literally. He takes a long time working on each painting, building up layers of glazes. He demonstrates fluency with this method of working. Looking at these paintings we get a sense of something buried but partially revealed.

His paintings are drawn from a variety of sources, drawings of Aberystwyth, photographs of aged surfaces which he has collected and images created on Photoshop. Through their built up surfaces we can call to mind emotions and memories we have of places and times.

Photoshop Images

These images were created from my charcoal drawings and textures I photographed around town.

Patina Photography

The weather-worn boats in the harbour fascinated me. They provided inspiration for the process of scraping back layers of paint.

Click to enlarge

Me by the caravan at Jeff's house, near Trefenter,
Wales. I'll be staying here when I'm using my studio

I've found a studio in remote location in Wales, near Bronant. I'm going to update this blog with photos of the location and pictures of work in progress and dairy enteries of thoughts about my work.

Interior Landscape Series

All four are Oil on Canvas 3ft x3ft

Oil on Canvas 6ft x5ft

Details

Statement about my recent paintings

As a starting point I used drawings of the harbour in Aberystwyth, from there I derived the geometry for later work. An interest in the aging process of painted surfaces first spurred me to engage with painting. I became particularly interested in the patina on the sides of boats in the harbour. Layers of colour worn away by the sea and sanded down by the owners. This evoked ideas of time, accident and the effect of weather on a surface which translated, in my own work, into a sustained effort of scraping back layers of paint to reveal what had gone before. Over time the work seems to dictate it’s own direction; previous accidents or ‘mistakes’ becoming as or more important than areas I had previously considered to be crucial to it’s success. Throughout their making I have shifted emphasises and the geometry of their composition, also I have departed radically from the original source. They became more about memory, the memory of being in a landscape, or simply the experience of day-to-day living and how this experience surfaces during the painting process. Memory isn’t a succession of still images but an interweaving of various stimuli including the visual but also emotion and tactile and auditory stimuli. The challenge then is how to translate this into paint. The use of glazes has allowed me to take these ideas further, allowing areas to show through translucent glazes and building up subtleties through layering areas of colour, like the accumulative effect of experience on memory. The fact that the work suggests landscape, perhaps an industrial wasteland, without depicting it literally is of interest here. They have come to represent an emotive interior landscape.