After Jakuren Painting

"Ah- Solitude. That is not the kind of thing that has one colour. A hillside cloaked in dark pines on an autumn evening" Jakuren, monk, late 12th century I've become fascinated with Japanese culture in general and poetry in particular over the last few years and have made pictures reacting to poems from time to time. The poems fascinate me as they are like little visual stock cubes and are both intense and evocative. They tend to operate by conjoining two phrases - a simple description of a scene, and something less tangible, be that a mood, an idea or something else. This makes them fantastic fantastic raw material for pictures, and it is fun to try and make the image and the words both change each other. In this one I have thought about the nature of solitude. One tree, in a crowd of other trees, is noticeably different and slightly set apart against a slightly brighter background. All the others are obviously the same species but are all painted in subtly different browns. The whole thing is based around a ditch and the trees lean in so the painting has both a closed-in feeling and a clear path to the lone tree and the edge of the forest. It all adds up to a sense that solitude has nothing to do with being on your own; its a state of existence that can occur even when surrounded by other people. One point of note about the poem is the statement that solitude isn't just one colour. This reflects and rejects a tradition in short forms of Japanese poetry of linking a mood to single colour and it absolutely fed into my decision to paint something that was alone in a place in which you might not expect it to be alone. The painting is 3' x 2' and is in oil on MDF. As with all my paintings it is made entirely from artist-grade high quality materials. It is unframed.

Painting:Oil on Wood

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:36 W x 24 H x 0.5 D in

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