'Shadowed Waters' An Exhibition of Paintings by Rupert Muldoon November 2016

An introduction to Rupert Muldoon to accompany an exhibition of his work entitled Shadowed Waters on 14 - 20 November 2016 at Timothy Langston Fine Art & Antiques, The Pimlico Road, Belgravia London.

http://www.timothylangston.com/stock/pictures/rupert-muldoon

I've always painted what has been around me: my surroundings. I'm also a gardener and this is my garden. This is where I live. The river has always drawn me to it as a place to sketch but I find it rather a challenge paint because every single day I go down there it looks different: It is sometimes misty, sometimes sunny, sometimes has ripples, sometimes as flat as a pancake. So this is the river Avon , and we're downstream from Salisbury. It's joined with a few more tributaries that are in the Salisbury Meadows and it becomes this wide beautiful stretch of crystal-clear water.

This is my studio and I am a painter who works in egg tempera, which is quite an unusual medium as it involves raw egg yolk and pure pigments- and by pure pigments I mean pigments that the ground and then mixed with water when you come to use it to then mix the yoke in. It dries quite quickly you have to work fast which gives the paintings a certain amount of energy I think.

You can lay down layers of colours quite quickly and build up a certain translucency and score into the paint while it's still wet. So get these flecks of light which is exactly as I see the river to be. The paintings have developed from small sketches like ones behind me and steadily got larger and larger.

It can take a month or more to complete painting. Often, I start a painting and rub it out after two weeks of working on it because it hasn't quite got what I want - the colours aren't right - or there's something about it! Often I turn it upside down or sideways because, being right-handed, the marks go in a certain direction always so it's nice to sort of play around that

Also, working on a panel which has been used before you're not being confronted with a blank canvas: there is texture there if no shape or scene and you sort of work within that to then find the next image. Everything's done more or less from my mind. So I go out - go for walk - might take a camera but then I come back here and just remember the colours of the day. Whether it's brilliantly sunny in wintertime, which is often like lightest time of year by the river because there are no leaves on the trees, or whether it's a misty day at the beginning of autumn because then you get incredible colours reflecting right into the water. And then I might work only with say two or three colours. So keep it a really refined colour palette so the painting becomes just almost like a colour field.

Because that is what the river does: It takes on the colours that are around it. I've also discovered if you're quite pure about it, just using primary colours: yellows, blues ... you can then, because of the translucent nature of paint, create the most extraordinary greens which have a luster and vary in their tint as much as water does itself. So I think trying to take that process and apply it makes the painting what it is. The river bank itself is a very complicated thing. There are trees, poplars, bits of foliage that dip into the stream. It's all moving and trembling. There are birds flitting around, the sound of the water ... and as I see that image, when I'm sitting there, I suppose I want to relay all of that onto a board and the way I found to do it is to not have anything in painting in much focus, you know, I want it all seem like it's moving and blowing in the breeze and the bird could appear... and it is an abstraction so it's not perfectly true to life it's not a still like a camera might take.

I love Peter Doig, Gerhard Richter, Clare Hall. They're all artists of the day whose colours and stance towards landscape painting I really admire.

I suppose with Richter it becomes a process and the painting is born out how he actually makes it and I think that's been a great influence actually with experimenting and painting with egg tempura. It is a process-driven creation. With older artists, I think Klimt landscapes are what really fascinate me. They are intricate, they're almost pointillism. He uses, as I do, portrait when he's painting a landscape. It's something about that format which captures a slice through what you see. You get a bit of sky, trees, foreground, water, near ground ... and I think that's a very interesting method when you are standing as a viewer and you, hopefully, are drawn into this painting. Those two if, they can possibly be combined, are my two favourites of the moment. Gerhard Richter and Klimt!

Видео 'Shadowed Waters' An Exhibition of Paintings by Rupert Muldoon November 2016 канала Timothy Langston