There were many stages of mental mock-ups that I went through before and during the execution of this painting, and I ended up having discarded almost all of them by the end of it. I can’t decide whether it works as a whole, but there are certainly elements of it and happy accidents that I want to progress within future works.
The original plan was to ‘artificially’ implant a figure into an otherwise uninterrupted landscape, like a character in a theatre set. I wanted there to be only a suggestion of the figure, out of focus and unaware: an accidental entering. However, I then started a secondary ground in the colour of the tennis court where I captured the figure in a photograph, accidentally reintroducing him into his original surroundings. I hate making grounds and the painting of this ground was, as always, rushed and uneven, with streams of white spirit puncturing a grossly mismatched surface. I ended up kind of liking this freer style but felt it clashed too much with the clean lines happening towards the right of the painting, so tried to create a middle ground across the rest of the painting by blocking in colour in a stencil-like way, switching halfway from negative to positive (I don’t know if that’s a good explanation but it makes sense to me when looking at the painting).
As I said before, I’m not sure if all of this works in combination but I’m happy with it as a compositional experiment. I’m always trying to find ways to include romantic, naturalistic elements in my paintings without them looking terrible and maybe this is a step in the right direction.