RoadMovies HomePage
FOR ROAD MOVIES PLEASE GO TO
www.villaparasol.com/trDoc.htm
FOR THE TALBOT RICE PAGES
The classic RoadMovie:
Taking the Moyenne Corniche too fast...
ripolin on board; 1999
[collection: La Lyonnaise de Banque]
INTRODUCTION
RoadMovies account for possibly the largest single theme in my work over the past ten years. The idea is simple: to depict landscape on the move, not static. In French this works neatly: these are pictures about 'voyage' rather than 'paysage'.
Usually the travelling is done in a car and some RoadMovies include the peripheral vision that catches glimpses of the rear-view mirror, steering wheel or guages in the dashboard - as in the 'classic' illustrated above. But there are also many pictures based on a walk - and I am planning others that will try to express the sensation we have of landscape and sights on a railway journey...
HISTORY
The earliest RoadMovies date from around 1990, although the idea can be dated specifically to the winter of 1980, spent in Florence. There I started to achieve a feel, on foot, for the labyrinth that is Florence and this resulted the following year in a very large crayon & pastel drawing of the city. By 1992 the idea had expanded to include multiple canvases in irregular order and there were perhaps six or ten such compositions in existence when I left Scotland late that year to live in France.
The great triumph for RoadMovies came in 2002, with the large exhibition devoted to them at the Talbot Rice Art Gallery in Edinburgh, at the University. This show (and its accompanying catalogue) included specially executed works, notably the wall-long composition on 51 canvases depicting the car journey from Nice to Florence, and a sequence of pictures about the drive to Scott's View in the Scottish Borders.
METHOD & SUBJECT MATTER
In France the instinct to carry on painting RoadMovies of the Scottish Borders increased my taste for using memory. And the memories were sometimes also collected in the form of very scribblesome sketches - many just a mark or two - executed while being driven on one of the routes. Many weeks or months later these marks would rescuscitate in me notions of detail or rhythms that were to emerge afresh in a new painting.
