Black Weir Paintings - Notes
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Blackweir is a wooded area just North of Cardiff Town Centre on the banks of the River Taff opposite Pontcanna Fields. I have been painting there on and off for the last two years with fellow painter Keith M. Martin.

Painting through observing the natural world in combination with other ideas continues to to be a rich and exciting way of working.
 
 
 
Black Mountain Paintings - Notes
• 'A day out' in the Black Mountains - with fellow artists K.M.Martin and P.J.O'Donoghue - eventually became a 4 year re-apprenticeship and an ongoing challenge to all my art practice.
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It becomes a process of trying to find qualities of authorship, it's a very hard card to play.
We were there - to see some chance - maybe. We were there to look, to not make assumptions or take things for granted - to 'look' in this way and to step back from aspects of self deception and history, is difficult.
 
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The reality of what was personally 'before' us and 'behind' us as artists, was already complete.
Although we had 'de-schooled' ourselves in individual ways,there was the obvious rehearsed history of techniques and preference, which soon became baggage and had to be left behind as best we could.
 
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This history, and the possibility of what we were looking at, needed in part, to be a shared vision, but negotiated personally and registered through direct practice rather than worked and rendered as if we knew what we were looking at, as if we were painting 'Landscapes', as if we knew what we were doing - that was the challenge of 'looking'.
 
• Paintings became the default objects of process rather than the created thing.They also became the register of failure, because to try and see how things failed was the only way forward.
This is not to deny or mystify the production of the painting - but to try and explain that it had to be 'seen' and evaluated as it occurred, as history, as laziness, as the observed, and re-assessed.
 
• Many of the images are a product of recovery and rediscovery. They become a sort of haphazard directory - initially this is frustrating, because the trickster 'painterly self ' can get in the way of the great forgetting and the great remembering of art history,and the persistence of its subtle themes.
 

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 When confronted with the 'real thing' - you either work through it, or you become lost in your own hopes and desires and history.
I find this to be one of the most important razors and self educative tools in painting. It will send you back to seek out the 'material' - it will make you scour libraries and most importantly, it will make you think twice about what you're doing. It is not an easy thing to deal with - it can be surprising and annoying.
 
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Sometimes it can seem a very defeating process - I do my best by these things - I try to understand them and make use of them and I move on to
the next painting.
This period helped set a new stamp on my painting and attitude, I continue
to develop what I found in the landscape through paint & other media including computer manipulation.