A NEW EXHIBITION IN LONDON

I'm 'pleased' to announce that I will be returning to 8 Greek Street in Soho (the London one) once more, to exhibit what I'm hoping people will one day refer to as my 'tree period' work. I have been painting 'scenes from nature', and 'pastoral vistas'. None of the work, however, was painted 'en plein air' and none of the drawings were either. My technique consists of going outdoors and staying there for some time, and only making pictures when I've been back indoors for even longer and forgotten everything. I am not one of those persons wearing a smock painting at an easel in some beauty spot.

Anyway, enough about me. There will be more than twenty drawings in the show, including all the original sketches, drawings and finished pieces for Holloway, the book I made last summer with Robert Macfarlane, Dan Richards and Richard Lawrence. There will also be a new suite of large graphite on paper works called Avenues, as well as the largest holloway drawing I've done and a pen and ink drawing that was so painstaking and took so fucking long that the glue from the tape holding it onto a bit of hardboard melted onto the paper.
I've also been working with the Centre for Fine Print Research in Bristol, with the aim of producing laser-etched 'prints'. This process uses a laser to vaporise the image onto a substrate; in this case, both black and white paper. Here's Dr Paul Laidler explaining it:
"The process uses carbon dioxide that is excited in a chamber. Emerging as light from an aperture in the chamber, the beam is focused by a series of mirrors, a lens and through a nozzle down to a thickness of approximately 0.2mm. When the beam comes in to contact with a material it cuts through by vaporising it. The nozzle moves across the surface of the material on an x and y axis that allows designs to be cut or engraved with a high level of accuracy and complexity in a variety of materials. The Laser Studio has a 10w, 30w and 200w flat bed laser with a cutting area of 70 x 95cm, 40 x 60cm and 90 x 140cm respectively. Laser cutting involves the use of a powerful laser to cut, etch or engrave into textiles, paper, card, plastics, vinyls, glass and some types of wood. A computer controls the path of the laser over the bed to melt, burn or vaporise the material."
Simple, right? The results are quite mesmerising; to me it looks as if trained paper-eating bacteria have been told to make a picture. The vaporised images look very organic. The CFPR have made vaporised versions of two drawings, February Holloway and Wait Here We Will Come For You. Both will be on show at the exhibition.
But the main thing, perhaps, is the paintings. I started them whilst Radiohead were working on the record that became The King of Limbs, and used photographs of them in an unfinished state as a main ingredient in the artwork for that record, which consisted of, basically, a newspaper. It has taken this long - as well as the looming deadline supplied by the date of this exhibition - to finish these paintings. Other stuff kept getting in the way, and I'm easily distracted too. I've sequestered myself in the studio for the whole summer to finish them, so I hope that people will like them.

I've decided to frame everything in ash wood. The ash is Yggdrasil, central to pre-Christian Norse mythology, which I alluded to in the artwork for The King of Limbs. The ash tree is currently under dire threat from a disease called, imaginatively enough, ash die-back.
Back in January I wrote about the title of the show, Far Away Is Close At Hand In Images Of Elsewhere, saying that some day I'd do something with the sentence. It's a very beautiful sentence to my mind, suggesting both positive and negative sentiments; in fact, it's a very sentimental expression. And this exhibition is also, maybe, my most sentimental yet. Give me a few more years and I'll be painting fluffy puppies or something.

ADDENDUM: I noticed that I said I'd been painting in the studio 'for the whole summer' just back there, which is a lie. I went to London for a week to do that Atomic Drawing Room and then I went and hid in a shed on the Essex marshes for a further week. My apologies for my misleading words.
Also, I've done a bit of searching for the origins of the sentence 'Far Away Is Close At Hand In Images Of Elsewhere' and I found out where it came from.
Here's a link, here's another, and here's the most informative I've yet found.