David F. Brandon

I don’t know if it’s the influence of living next to the sea that has spurred your admiration for my latest painting (THE FAR HORIZON) but I appreciate it all the same! In reproduction it looks like it ought to be very large, but, in fact, it’s of a more modest size,-60cms by 100cms. I’ve been introducing boats into the script for quite some time but they have been transported into stage props. The thing is, that they were complete boats ready to be used or abandoned after use. This last image, this last idea, the abandonment, the having been used, was the stronger idea for me, but had to be reinforced in some way. Enter, stage right, the image of this decaying fishing boat that I photographed in France a couple of years ago,- it most certainly will never take to the seas again and thus colours the interpretation of the other paintings which contain the complete seaworthy craft. That is, of course, if they are exhibited together.

The image also represents a number of other ideas. It’s the end of a cycle. A similar idea to the falling autumn leaves in a number of my works. In fact, if you look closely you will see two leaves caught spinning in the wind just to the left of the main image. Also I have often included numbers in various of my paintings(LA MIRILLA, ACARICIANDO LA CORTEZA ENMOECIDA) and here you can just see the remains of the port registration number, which represents, too, the idea of the termination of a cycle of life/use. The file is closing.

All this sounds very negative, but it isn’t, it’s romantic. It’s a beautiful image, especially as I have isolated the boat from the fixed horizon and distant landscape of the original photograph. It is still wedded to the water via its reflection, and to the foreground via the false shoreline, but is beached somewhere in the mists of the past. It has become a dream boat, though not of the other world, since it still has it’s number and we can recognise that it was once a real working boat. A real dying working boat just divorced enough from the real world to allow me, or the viewer, to invest it with the magic of absent crew/actors, of past activity and present abandonment and silence. Silence is very important. It’s at peace. It’s a peaceful image. What the boat’s been through is left to the imagination, is in the ether! I like/liked the mix of the real and imaginary possibilities the image holds/held.

I thought I’d include this quote from a critic in New York, Peter Plagens, of an exhibition of painters sent to picture war scenes.- (Bits in blue not entirely relevant to my case, or I don’t agree!) -

“Painter’s impressions (of calamity) are, of course, less “real” than, say, Robert Capa’s photograph of the exact second of a Spanish Civil War soldier’s death, or Eddie Adam’s unforgettable footage of a Viet Cong suspect’s summary execution. (Photography’s mechnical objecivity tells us that those events actually occured in front of a lens.) Painters since Hieronymus Bosch, on the other hand, have always made this stuff up. The trade-off is that paintings don’t come with a certificate of veracity, and that photography and video don’t notice with astonishment and emphasize with emotion the way a painter’s eye and hand do.”

What we painters still deal with far better than anyone else is silence, we allow time for meditation, time to develop thoughts!

There are, I guess, other more artistic reasons for its existence too. I wanted to extend the range of colours used in my work to make the exhibitions more dynamic. I’d started this process with a lot of the landscape (trees/doors) paintings, but they still had a limited range of colours. They were, of course, a step on from the monochromatic greens and blues of some of the portraits and other larger works and even some of the recent boats (CENTER STAGE). The idea was not to pass on from this technique to a full colour range to leave the monochrome behind, but to produce something that made, by contrast, the monochrome more intense and the full colour paintings more colourful. I started this idea off with the tree trunks (EL ESPECTRO DE UN IDEA, LOS ACTORES DE LA LEGUA),where I tried to include a variant of the two techniques in the same painting. The problem of this type of contrasting techniques/colours in different paintings, obviously, is that it only happens when the paintings are exhibited together, or, to a lesser extent, if the viewer has a knowledge of a fair range of the artwork.

The problem is, however, that all this analysis comes after the fact and could well be less than trustworthy! At the time of creating something, I guess the most you can say is that it feels right and as the pieces fall together it gets to feel even better, or it just doesn’t “work” at all. I think that what I’ve been up to, to the best of my abilities, works for me and, after all is said and done, it’s the artist that has to live with what he produces. I think that I have only ever painted one painting in my whole life, and it’s still growing. Artists only ever have one good idea and so spend their lives building on that.