TIM BAKER

And now the final (for now) part of the Towers series, the Triptych I originally planned and got rather waylaid by the last one. Been working on this a long time it seems strange to finally post it. Of all my paintings this is probably the most representational. It’s funny, my representational work is getting more abstract and my abstract work is getting more representational, if in symbolic terms. Maybe they will meet in the middle?And to use a rather wanky phrase a ‘psychogeographic map’ of where I live and the symbols within.

Left to right the panels are ‘Towerland 1: Two Figures on a Road.’, ‘Towerland 2: Light In The Basement (Inverse Lighthouse)‘ and ‘Towerland 3: KG Swansong / The River’. The towers are part of the Victorian development where I live, the garden, the pollarded trees, the filter beds and the road, the River Thames, the Church That Shall Not Be Drawn, etc.

It’s also a reference to my previous artworks, like a sort of artistic key: the aforementioned filterbeds in BOLT, the 30’s electrical substation, the waterworks building, River God (water urn), Swansong II and Garrick’s Temple, St Raphael’s (aka that church I try to draw and fail although I have just finally finished that watercolour I started in January!), and the Ice House.

I liked the idea of seeding my works as symbology in a large painting, roughly where they are in real life but converting them into symbols. It’s actually quite hard to extract them into abstractions. If you were wondering about the KG (by the church and in the title), it turns out Kevin Gately is buried at St Raphaels, some people might know the name.

A possible victim of the police, he died during a clash at an anti-fascist protest in 1974. It was on my mind because the 40th anniversary of Blair Peach’s murder has just passed, and the two are usually linked.

Also like a lot of my paintings there’s a duality – water always features because I feel a connection to it, but also fire/electricity here, light vs dark. Even a Van Gogh reference (I was planning to put two figures on the road in honour of Vincent’s obsession with those paintings, and forgot. Then I realised the two buildings could be the two figures).

Production wise, it’s the first of my paintings to use emulsion. I found this reduced amazing Crown Paint tester that are a tube which has a brush attached like liquid shoe-shine but for paint. I want more of these!

Also I did the first panel last – hence it’s not shown in the ‘Making of’ above, and struggled with that darned road hence the heavy layers of paint which became a feature. I didn’t want to just mix black and white, but created a multi-chromatic grey. I also ran out of decent black acrylic (Poundland and Crawford & Black aka The Works acrylic is shit, can confirm) and had only a small dog-end tube of white which didn’t help.

The first panel was a lot of headaches because initially it got too dark and muddy and didn’t fit, still is a little bit like the ugly child to me but I won’t go back to it. Then again it is meant to be jarring, a representation of the urban vs the natural of #3, so it was supposed to be more rusty brown and orange to the green of the opposing panel. (You see, I do actually think this stuff out!)

Originally I did a Jackson Pollock splatter field on it – you can see bits poking through still. Eventually with some Posca lines and the application of white spirit to the Markal lines it started to fit in with the theme. The dreamy effect is a lot to do with softening and blurring the lines of the Markal Paintstiks. It got very magic realist and Arcadian which I like. Then again that panel didn’t want to be too dreamy, more like being woken up by urban foxes at 3am.

The middle panel the garden section went a bit wrong, you might see ghosts of little circles meant to depict my plant pots. I had to rework that carefully without losing the dynamic ‘apple tree’ strokes.

Panel 3 caused me little trouble at all. I’m in love with both Phthalo Greens/Turquoise anyway (an almost spiritual colour for me, please don’t mention David Icke but didn’t they find out the Universe is actually turquoise or something?) and serpentine lines. Maybe Garrick would be proud (or maybe he’d say ‘what is that crap?’).

I find it deeply ironic that I’m producing action and abstract paintings because my 18 year old self really didn’t have any truck with this kind of thing. But it’s a lot of fun developing your own mythology, your own symbols and semantics, delving into your subconcious, letting the lines draw themselves.

I can see how Paul Klee and others got entranced with it (I was fascinated with Klee as a kid after seeing that Coffee Grinder painting, I used to scribble Klee-esque symbols on my parents computer paper, a babbling crowd of shapes).