Hugh Marwood: Completed Painting: 'Shut 1'

Sunday 2 September 2012

Completed Painting: 'Shut 1'

Summer flew by. We’re back to school and there’s an autumnal nip in the morning air already. I had half planned various trips over the break but none of them actually happened. That was partly due to the poor state of my arthritic knees discouraging me from walking very far but, more positively, because I got stuck into an ambitious painting that I was determined to complete before the day job kicked back in. Pleasingly, I made it under the wire and, though I say it as shouldn’t, it's pretty successful. Actually, I think it’s the strongest thing I’ve done this year.

'Shut 1', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Two Adjoining Panels,
150 cm X 100 cm, 2012

‘Shut 1’ relates to my two previous ‘Closed’ paintings and is a partial distillation of some of their themes and motifs. I’ve already discussed my fascination with images of closed industrial shutters and the possible meanings they suggest and composition schemes they inspire. The source images for ‘Shut 1’ share the same parallel vertical divisions with broad sections being interspersed with alternate narrow hinge strips and simple linear junctions, but lack the punctuating door furniture, locks, or obvious damage included previously. Vertical divisions aside, the only modulation of their essential blankness comes from the ghost of a previous paint colour showing through the dirty white topcoat and some spare, partially obliterated graffiti characters.

Industrial Shutter, Central Leicester, 2012

It seemed a great opportunity to have another go at creating something essentially blank but simultaneously full of subtle visual incident. I’ve also discussed my interest in formal all-over abstraction and the modern tradition of the white painting before. I wanted to move back into that territory but preserve the continuity of recent paintings.

Study For 'Shut 1', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Paper,
60 cm X 45 cm, 2012

Instead of working straight from a small sketchbook study, I took the time to produce several larger paper-based studies from which the final piece developed. It features more passages of definite colour and fragmented text characters than originally envisaged, but through its expanded scale, still seems to retain a sense of relative off-white emptiness, (an impression that is somewhat lost when colour and detail are concentrated in these photographs). The dichotomy between something and nothing gets me every time.

Study For 'Shut 1', Acrylics & Paper Collage On Paper,
60 cm X 40 cm, 2012

As usual, the surface of the actual painting was laboriously built from multiple layers of paper, PVA and acrylic paint. This can take ages but, at a certain point, always becomes really enjoyable. Increasingly, I’m incorporating fragments of actual reclaimed posters into this process, - something that occurred to me after my New Year’s Day walk/post. The printer’s dots evident in them inspired the emerging passages of repeat spot pattern in the painting. I created them with adhesive labels and now wonder if they’re equally like the perforations of security shutters. My intention was that these, along with various text elements, should float across the surface like ideas rather than appearing to physically exist on a particular plane.

It’s worth mentioning that the painting actually comprises two identical tall panels bolted together along their vertical edges. I liked the logic of incorporating an actual physical junction formally, but also because splitting it's the only way to get it down my stairs!