A Conversation About Pebble Paintings

regarding the 'pebble project'

S.W:

Pebbles seem to be the perfect vehicle for your style of painting - controlled yet gestural and textural. Can you tell me more about why you have chosen to paint pebbles?

R.K:

A few years ago I was living in south Devon, in a small seaside town. At the time I felt quite unhappy and unsettled regarding my painting and drawing...finding less and less pleasure, reward and meaning in my art. I decided to somehow go 'back to basics', and try to rediscover my love of paint and the joy of looking.

I wanted to get away from complicated compositions and 'narrative meaning'. Even still-life painting was too loaded with possible narrative and symbolic readings, and soon became boring to me. I think I was bored with man-made objects because they didn't seem 'unknown' enough to me ..there was not enough mystery. I needed something almost abstract in it's shapes and colours.

When I look at a small stone through a magnifying glass I discover a kind of new world. Something like a landscape, or map, with landmarks, features of interest, important navigational points for my eye to follow. Every stone is unique...always different...always new to me, and just really good fun to paint.

Naturally, living by the sea pebbles were close at hand.... but it's a life long love of mine; rocks, pebbles, fossils, geology and the sea. It is important to me where the stone was found ..and that I picked it out from amongst all the others. It is always a personal memory of sorts, and in that way not quite as objective as it might perhaps seem.

S.W:

I'm very interested in your decision-making process and how you eliminated a number of things that you felt had symbolic readings before choosing to paint pebbles.  Do you think the scale of your work has any effect on possible readings?  Your large paintings are close to monumental and the smaller ones are so beautiful and intimate.  Can you tell me about how you work with scale?

R.K:

Scale is very important.

I guess the small paintings are closer to the scale of the actual pebble I paint, whereas the larger paintings truly distorts the reality, and I hope, creates something other than a kind of 'portrait of a small stone'.

I think the big paintings are more abstract to the audience... more mysterious. Somebody recently described the large paintings as: 'pebbles like asteroids'.

I hope people will get up close to see the paint application, because I don't intend to create any kind of 'photo-realism'... I want the paint to be the body/meat, and abstraction of the image.

Naturally, or instinctively the audience will always come up close to a small painting... people tend to stand back from a large canvas. This will have a big impact on everybody's individual, emotional interpretations of the paintings. I try to paint so that the paintings (big and small) 'work' seen both close up and from a distance.

S.W:

How a spectator/viewer physically approaches a painting is always interesting, standing far enough back for any image to properly register, but then hopefully drawn in to study the brushwork. I'm so glad you mentioned this. What do you think about when you are actually applying the paint?R.K:

One of the problems I had back in Devon, before I decided to go 'back to basics', was 'over-thinking' and 'over-analysing' my work. An artist can, in my experience, think the art work to a death. I could not turn off the 'inner censor', and it was a major distraction. Thankfully painting and drawing the pebbles changed that destructive thinking pattern.

I love to really look, (and to really see!) and you need to concentrate totally when wanting to really look, and really see. The somewhat awkward process of looking through a magnifying glass, and then at the canvas, backwards and forward, and through the act of painting, discovering more and more detail. There does not seem to be room for any unwanted thoughts while I'm involved in this process.

Sometimes I will think of other things... I will suddenly remember something from long ago...or a dream I had the night before. Sometimes these memories are quite intense. If the work is not going well, my thoughts might start to drift...and then it's best to take a break. But mostly, if I'm working well, my thoughts are only about the painting process while I'm painting. The 'analysing' is done when I look at the painting in between the 'painting sessions'.

S.W:

It sounds like you have carefully eliminated a lot of things and honed a process to allow 'flow' in the making part of your practice; and then are able to step back and analyse more critically. Is it possible for you to tell me more about the analysis? Are you happier with some works more than others? If so, what is it about them that makes them more successful in your eyes?R.K:

An 'elimination' of sorts has to take place during every painting project. The process might be divided into stages, so that the first stage is looking for, and selecting a stone to paint. The next stage is looking at, and maybe sketching the selected stone. Then comes the painting process, and during this the 'intent' will evolve.

I think a painting I can be happy with is one where the paint has become 'something in itself'...

when the subject-matter has been drained (so to speak), and the real stone is the one on the canvas, (although at this point, not a stone at all!) The canvas is also gone...I work to saturate the canvas so that hardly anything remains of the canvas weave.)

All of this is of cause mostly 'a feeling', but it's the process of actual painting that allows that transition...the 'detection work', and then a transition into a sort of abstraction, or 'new truth'. I start off by looking intensely at the stone, and gradually end up shifting that intense looking to the canvas...in there lies the 'analysis'...if you can call it that.

S.W:

You talked earlier about avoiding narrative meaning, and I would argue you have been successful. Instead, you have created something deliciously enigmatic and mysterious, yet your titles are dry and matter-of-fact. Can you say more about your titles? Are you tempted to call your paintings something more mysterious?

R.K:

My titles are carefully thought out. I deliberately want to give a very dry 'pointer', rather than a more enigmatic title. By giving the paintings matter-of-fact titles I hope to give the viewer a factual starting point, to allow the further reading of the image to be free and open-ended.

I have called the painting: 'Single striped pebble', because that was my starting point. It was what I was looking at, initially: a pebble with a single, thin stripe running round it. Lets imagine some different titles for a moment. I could have called the painting: 'Large pebble found on sunny Devon beach' (already the title gives (unpleasant) emotional pointers).

I could have gone full-on Howard Hodgkin, and called it: 'Birthday cake on beach love was dead'... Or perhaps more abstractly poetic: 'Fracture of spirit'...'Emotional map #3'.... 'Meditation on divided space'. etc. All those titles makes me cringe... I feel strongly that the only 'right' title is a factual one.

To call my paintings 'untitled' would also be wrong to my mind... If I call the painting 'untitled' it somehow suggests that I'm asking the viewer to tell me what they are looking at. I guess the irony is that we do in fact, as artists, ask that question: ...what is it you/we look at??... but I think the image needs to ask that question by itself.