Simon Carter 2013 Complete.Pdf

Simon Carter Front cover (detail) Winter Sea, 2011 (catalogue no. 46) Photograph: Noah Carter Noah Photograph: Simon Carter The Shapes of Light 2013 www.messums.com 8 Cork Street, London W1S 3LJ Telephone: +44 (0)20 7437 5545 … how days pass in the studio Today is the 22nd November. It is Thursday and, like most I trace over some of the drawings on the light box, taking a days, I have been down to the beach to make drawings. The degree of expression out of the lines to see how they work as sun was beginning to dissolve amongst a vast Turneresque glow. design. With some paintings I repeatedly copy drawings on the The wind was blowing pale rivers of sand across the beach and light box; I like the way that unexpected outcomes sometimes corrugating the sea, waves coming in small and packed together. arise from the imperfections of this process. I might square up There were a few gulls and a few sanderling at the water’s edge. one of these copies and use it to rework the canvas. This as a On the horizon freight ships were lining up to enter Felixstowe way of forcing change onto the painting and of not allowing a and wind farms flickered in distant sunlight. There was a single sense of satisfaction with it. As the painting develops over the yacht passing. next few weeks and months, I will return to the beach many times. I will also make drawings from the painting and from I made 7 drawings quickly and without much attempt at revision the location drawings; edging forward looking for something or second thought. I was at the beach less than an hour before to happen. 1. Figure and Sea, 2011 returning to the studio a few roads back from the seafront. It is 2. Study for ‘Figure and Yacht’ I, 2011 mixed media on paper only back in the studio that I can see whether there is anything Although the painting might end up as only a few marks, the mixed media on paper 1 7 1 18 x 25 cms 7 ⁄8 x 9 ⁄8 ins 21 x 23 cms 8 ⁄4 x 9 ins of interest or use in the day’s drawings. I make a pot of tea and process of making the painting is a prolonged and improvised go through the work. discovery of those marks; marks that seem true and that return the painting to some relation with things seen. I seem to need I find the act of drawing in the landscape not only provides a those things observed out in the world, things that I have found record of information but also opens a gap between what is seen engaging and compelling and around which a painting might and what is painted, allowing both to have their proper space. start to coalesce. It also adds to the lexicon of possible marks that might allow painting to address those things seen. I scrape out all the paint, remix the pale turquoise and put up a new set of marks. I block in a pale shape in the upper half of the The first 3 drawings were made with a hard graphite stick, canvas but lose the sense of air in the surface, I try darkening scratching in clouds above lines of waves, but they now seem the turquoise, scrape out the horizon, alter the ratio of red to too tentative. The remaining 4 drawings were made using a blue in the grey I’m mixing, scrape out and reapply a pale colour mix of soft and hard graphite. Layers of cloud are traced in an that has muddied, sit for a while to see where it is all going and oily black line passing above a thick dark sea lined with more then try again. A few marks of paint can contain everything or waves. These seem to have in them a fragment of the afternoon nothing. but at an interesting tangent to it. One of these drawings looks particularly complete and provides a way of making sense of, It is the end of the afternoon before things start to have any and using, the others. I cut a mount from scrap paper in order truth to them. The light is gone but I have the beginnings of to isolate the central part of this drawing and use it to make something to come back to tomorrow, an early conjecture that another start on the small canvas hanging on the painting wall. requires work. Blocking in a pale turquoise that might stand for the wind- This is how days pass in the studio. scoured cold afternoon light, I then make a few big lines in a dark rusty grey guided by the new drawing. Simon Carter Simon Carter: The Shapes of Light Andrew Lambirth The theme and viewpoint of this new body of work by Simon Carter, made over the last 16 months, is that of a spectator standing on a beach and looking out to sea. It is a very particular beach and a very particular stretch of sea, because Carter paints the coast he has known all his life, that he has grown up with and loves. Effectively, this comprises seven or so miles of Essex coastline centred on his home town of Frinton- on-Sea. This is his landscape and his mindset, the crucible of his painterly thought and activity. All his new paintings derive from drawings made at different sites around the town: on the marshes, by the beach huts, along the sea wall. But the focus is not on incidental details but on the elements: earth, sea and sky. As he says: ‘In a sense there’s nothing there – but there’s also everything there.’ A single figure features in many of these new paintings, a solitary outline in a depopulated landscape. In fact, the figure is often a silhouette and is based upon the shadow that Carter himself throws on the ground, and it has the same foreshortening of a shadow at certain times of day – rendering Carter’s tall body stockier in shape. Another source for this figure is van Gogh’s On the Road to Tarascon, famously used by Francis Bacon in his van Gogh paintings, and already used by Carter in a painting entitled Van Gogh in Essex. In his life and his paintings, Carter stresses his closeness with his surroundings: ‘myself and the landscape, there’s no separation between us’. The artist paints himself into the landscape, but his figure also 3. A Bank of Clouds, 2012 (opposite) acrylic on canvas stands for the spectator. We are thus encouraged to share the 1 3 110 x 100 cms 43 ⁄4 x 39 ⁄8 ins unique role of artist as observer, and to enter the painting. In 4. Study for ‘Figure and Yacht’ III, 2012 (above) fact, there are two main groups of pictures here: those in which mixed media on paper 5 3 27 x 30 cms 10 ⁄8 x 11 ⁄4 ins 5. Study for ‘Figure and Yacht’ II, 2012 (below) a figure appears, and those in which the light is the principal mixed media on paper 5 1 presence. But whatever the subject, these paintings, focusing 27 x 31 cms 10 ⁄8 x 12 ⁄4 ins on the threshold of sea and rock where the elements are in flux, 6. Figure and Yacht II, 2012 (opposite) are mostly about how sunlight falls on land or water, and the acrylic on canvas 150 x 160 cms 59 x 63 ins shapes it makes. The process by which Carter arrives at these paintings is an interesting and complex one. To begin with he makes any number of drawings in front of the motif, in often quite small sketchbooks. He might be drawing with grey oil pastel, pencil or charcoal and perhaps a couple of coloured crayons (blue and yellow). These are tonal studies done very quickly, made instinctively and without too much conscious control, perhaps six or eight in a morning. Each drawing records about 10 minutes of concentrated looking, and each painting may use 40 or 50 of these drawings. Back in the studio, Carter makes other, more schematic drawings on a light-box, tracing over the original studies, formalizing them. The information in the first observational drawings is filtered and simplified in the studio drawings, and the ideas for a painting begin to emerge. As Carter has said: ‘Subjects are only starting points. The further I get from the point of departure, the more I can see the painting.’ There is a crucial gap between the experience of looking at the sea and the making of the painting. Into that gap comes drawing. It is, in effect, a strategy for distancing the two activities – looking at nature and painting – in order that the painted image is not simply a record of things seen, but a statement about the nature of painting and a more general (and distinctly uncalculated) comment about the glories of existence. Yet the essential mystery of the painting act remains: ‘I don’t know exactly what it is that I do in the studio’, he admits frankly. Once at work on the canvas, the process is one of endless re- working as Carter explores the dialogue between the ostensible subject and the means of expression. As can be seen from even a cursory glance, Carter employs a purposeful and determined painterly attack, but he is also prepared to revise constantly, to change and re-engage. He comments: ‘I think everything in the studio is provisional.’ As he works on a painting, Carter will refer constantly to his drawings, which might include large charcoal studies, pastels and watercolours.

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