TIM ROSSITER
PROCESSES THAT FUEL THE PAINTINGS
I have the greatest affection for the surfaces, colours and shapes of the world, but I don’t choose to paint them in a literal way. How we view things and how we remember them is affected by both circumstance and emotion. And we can imagine.
So, for instance, in a recent and still ongoing series called Papageno’s Birds I imagined that on the first night of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, the character of Papageno, the bird catcher, has live birds in the cage which he carries on his back, and before the performance they have escaped and are flying about the set. Why would I need such an elaborate back story to a painting?
Well, firstly it just came to me as an image in my mind. Secondly, I can be surprisingly literal for an imaginative painter and I like to find some rational excuse, however improbable, for combining unlikely elements. The Magic Flute, set nominally in Ancient Egypt, but with elements of Persian Zoroastrianism and 18th Century Austrian Enlightenment Freemasonry thrown in provides the perfect vehicle, especially once the birds are loose. This all might seem like a very intellectual process, but in fact it is just a useful framework to hang the feelings on and these come up unbidden while I paint.
Also I love the imagined world of The Magic Flute which seems to me genuinely full of magic on every level. As Hermann Hesse has one of his characters say in Steppenwolf ‘The Magic Flute presents life to us as a wondrous song. It honours our feelings, transient as they are, as something eternal and divine ‘.
PAINTING TECHNIQUE
I find it curious when, in an exhibition catalogue there is an incredibly detailed description of somebody’s thoughts about the work, but next to nothing about how it was painted. So here goes:
I paint in oils, thinned with liquin, a modified alkyd resin, that allows me to paint in translucent glazes on a snowy white ground of up to 7 layers of acrylic gesso, laid on panel. I make most of my decisions about the work in pencil, working these days from a very small and freely realised drawing, and in this way I can make rapid and radical changes to the composition, something that is necessarily much slower once paint is applied. If I need to make major changes once I’m using colour, I have to scrape and sand back and re-gesso that section, so that I can again paint on a white ground.
I use only permanent colours and work with small soft brushes, often on largish panels, working on one painting over a period of from 3 weeks to 3 months. Working with small brushes in this way may seem perverse, but although I continue to experiment with other methods, I haven’t yet found another way which gives me the luminosity and painted calligraphic freedom that I value.
I have the greatest affection for the surfaces, colours and shapes of the world, but I don’t choose to paint them in a literal way. How we view things and how we remember them is affected by both circumstance and emotion. And we can imagine.
So, for instance, in a recent and still ongoing series called Papageno’s Birds I imagined that on the first night of Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, the character of Papageno, the bird catcher, has live birds in the cage which he carries on his back, and before the performance they have escaped and are flying about the set. Why would I need such an elaborate back story to a painting?
Well, firstly it just came to me as an image in my mind. Secondly, I can be surprisingly literal for an imaginative painter and I like to find some rational excuse, however improbable, for combining unlikely elements. The Magic Flute, set nominally in Ancient Egypt, but with elements of Persian Zoroastrianism and 18th Century Austrian Enlightenment Freemasonry thrown in provides the perfect vehicle, especially once the birds are loose. This all might seem like a very intellectual process, but in fact it is just a useful framework to hang the feelings on and these come up unbidden while I paint.
Also I love the imagined world of The Magic Flute which seems to me genuinely full of magic on every level. As Hermann Hesse has one of his characters say in Steppenwolf ‘The Magic Flute presents life to us as a wondrous song. It honours our feelings, transient as they are, as something eternal and divine ‘.
PAINTING TECHNIQUE
I find it curious when, in an exhibition catalogue there is an incredibly detailed description of somebody’s thoughts about the work, but next to nothing about how it was painted. So here goes:
I paint in oils, thinned with liquin, a modified alkyd resin, that allows me to paint in translucent glazes on a snowy white ground of up to 7 layers of acrylic gesso, laid on panel. I make most of my decisions about the work in pencil, working these days from a very small and freely realised drawing, and in this way I can make rapid and radical changes to the composition, something that is necessarily much slower once paint is applied. If I need to make major changes once I’m using colour, I have to scrape and sand back and re-
I use only permanent colours and work with small soft brushes, often on largish panels, working on one painting over a period of from 3 weeks to 3 months. Working with small brushes in this way may seem perverse, but although I continue to experiment with other methods, I haven’t yet found another way which gives me the luminosity and painted calligraphic freedom that I value.
FROM THE ARTIST