The ENGLISH GIRL Oil Painting...
...And other works done in Oxford, England, 1972-73.
Click on the thumbnail pictures to go to the page of each work.
English Girl
Painted by artist in 1972, Oxford, England
Iffley Fen
On the edge of Iffley Village near Oxford, England, just beside the River Thames.
Summer of 1971.
Pastel.
The Path
Oxford, England, Summer of 1972.
Oil on canvass.
I grew up on art. As a toddler in Japan in the late '40's I remember staring at the expressionist paintings my mother had bought done by the contemporary Japanese painter Hyodo. Mom could afford to gather a serious collection of contemporary fine art by a few decent Japanese artist as well as a nice collection of classical prints and other objects d'art such as carvings and statuettes.
Ever since I could remember (and that's sometime before I was one year old) there was something around the house that was either live fine art or good photo reproductions on each wall. It might be in my genes. It feels as though it has something to do with the universe. It even seems like the term "universe" is to puny, too small to describe this.
You know, art is big. It's seriously important. Not all art, but some is the human effort to reach out and touch something beyond the universe. And people these days are taking it all entirely too lightly. The early part of the 21st century is a merchandizing disaster where art no longer has a place with most of the population because it does not serve the money-making purposes of the economy. Look at the big front pages of the major search engines, when they put in the category "arts and leisure" they offer nothing but sports and entertainment. No art. No way for you to find us on the net unless by accident or if you're a really good web surfer. So this touch with the universe is lost in a sea of selfishness and insignificance.
Astronomy fascinated me. By the time I was in High School, I wanted to become an astronaut (that was in the 60's, when people actually went to the moon). I was extremely fortunate in that my High School was so crowded that they had split-session shifts and I went in the morning. Then when school was out, that's when I spent the rest of the afternoon hanging out in the chemistry and the physics labs, and then inevitably the art room.
I made the decision to be an artist very carefully. But when I embarked on my stormy art career, I brought with me a fascination for astronomy. To me it was the otherworldliness of objects in space, including our own planet that I found fascinating. I'm aware of the claim that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in the cosmos, but I observe that the aesthetic nature of similar matter of diverse locations of the universe differs. Even if matter does function the same way, which remains to be proven, every astral body is necessarily different in it's aesthetic personality. I call it the law of unexceptional diversity.
The good thing about art is that it's such a great vehicle for grappling with the unknown. The artist tends to be reaching for something, he or she knows not what, and often is getting somewhere. It takes us far out of our bland mundane universe of productivity and profit motive. That's what I was trying to do in my painting "English Girl" in England back in nineteen seventy-two. Seated in the nude on a red cloth and on a wooden chair, she leans casually elbow on knee. Perhaps a characteristic British blend of Norse and Roman, sunburned, slender arms and powerful legs. Seemingly the build of a recreational cyclist.
But that's the end of the representational world she's in. I've put her in new surroundings, in a world of her own, in a manner of speaking; in this abstract Germanic expressionist world in which blue skies and crimson minerals interact while large plants twine in intense sunlight. It gave me a chance to use my cadmium red and cobalt violet.
Click here to go to digital artwork based on the painting English Girl.
Click here to return to "Flowers beside a New Hampshire Forest, Gallery Nine".
Click on the thumbnail to see the background digital art,
"Image102pastel3".
Click here to return to "Finsbury Park Detail"
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Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
email address: art@paulhallart.com
...And other works done in Oxford, England, 1972-73.