NEW SUBJECT MATTER
13 05 06. and the sun is shining, everything looks clean washed, and so I feel a joyous spring urge for clear colour in the clear air, a willow against a bright sky










13 04 30. Today I feel that I am getting on with El Greco's Tor.  This is what I see from my window, the shining town of white houses around Glastonbury Tor. Sometimes there are storms: this sky came from Toledo. it has been painted in oil  on  a large 164x131cms canvas, & paint using flake white, ivory black, alizarin crimson, prussian blue, lemon yellow and yellow ochre.

El Greco's Tor

Homage to Caspar David Freidrich

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THE INVENTOR'S SHED

This red shed should emanate energy - a bit like Dr Who's Tardis..what great ideas have been cogitated in this space. another of Godney's 'Monoliths'.

oil on canvas 120x100cms

MURAL - Where the Wild Things Are

this is the life of a jobbing painter - makes me feel joyful!

TOR PICTURE

13 03 04.   Tor picture, as yet un-named, 164x131cms oil on canvas. The trees so brutally pollarded have a first world war trench feeling, but set against a Magritte sky, the atmosphere changes. the trees are shaped like Rodin's Balzac. I started on February 27th thinking about the palette to use and mixing some colours.  In daylight things have changed.  I have decided to use cobalt blue down to pthalo blue in the sky, and ultramarine in the river water:  the mauve in the cloud to be of cobalt and vermillion, following the Sargent pattern of his flesh tints – no alizarin or ultramarine on flesh, and for this none in the sky. Not of course, that this is flesh, but this way the orangey white (vermillion and cadmium lemon) sing more.   Works in the sketch.  The rest to be using alizarin, lemon yellow, ultramarine and vermillion.  No black this time.

GODNEY MONOLITHS

The Bateman Feeding Circle

On an early morning when the sun was burning off the mist, this cattle feeding circle loomed out at me, steaming, making me think of city gas containers. This is the fourth painting in my series for my MA exhibition later this year.











Phil's Digger


When I walk past this abandoned digger, I think of the generations of peat diggers, and the labour in the diggings that has occurred round here for at least 2000years. I shall make smaller paintings of 'monoliths', things I find iconic in the area, paintings measuring120x100cms, and the larger paintings, those 164x130cms to be landscapes

RETURN TO MA STUDIES

I go back to Bath Spa after a long break to finish my MA fine art this September. I intend to make a body of paintings about now, creating a dialogue about how I see the world and my attitude towards it, myself, in that environment. 6 largish paintings measuring about163 x 134cms, and a similar number of smaller ones, 120x100cms, oil on canvas, or calico on board to exhibit in an appropriate space. I am greatly influenced by William Sasnal’s paintings seen in London in 2012.. He appears to do a lot of preparatory work, so that when he eventually makes a brush stroke, it is often a virtuoso, ‘zenned’ as in Chinese watercolour painting – the breath of the stroke is visible. Other painters that I have been researching are Josef Albers, (for his ‘Interaction of Colour’) Rosie Snell and Alex Katz, (for their reductionism), Dan Hays, (for his understanding of the phenomology of colour) and Gerhard Richter, (for his catholic approach to painting)

Putting Godney on the Map 2012 164x133cms oil on canvas

Gods Island  2012     164x134cms      oil on canvas

Boris and Igor 2013     164x134cms      oil on canvas

India 2012

I am just back from 3 weeks in Rajhastan and Benares.  I did a number of water-colour sketches, working on a theory of reductiontism, and memory, from which I intend to make a few paintings, and to try to recreate some of the sensations of colour I felt:  here are some 'Lotus Cafe, Benares', Kolyat, Floating Palace, Udiaphur, all oil on canvas around 110x90cms

and here are some of the photographs I took:

http://youtu.be/HcoOOY1PRFc