Three figures by the river
Three figures by river
These relate to the time when we first came to France went swimming in the river. It was warm and sunny and sometimes I fell asleep. When I woke up it was wondering where I was. Waking up one time I saw three people by the river, standing in certain positions and it stuck in my mind. I did a little drawing and later started constructing these pictures of three figures. A white haired lady in the middle, it seemed like three ladies who appeared to be related or maybe not, or knew each other. I started to paint them in different forms and colours seeing what happened. What seemed to be the relationship with them or what it looked like as I changed colours, as I moved them slightly, whether it had any sense of mystery, whether that mystery would unravel.
I kept trying to see what happened, I didn’t realise that by changing the back ground shapes, the figures, the positions, the colours, it did have a totally different emotional feeling to it at least. This went on for a while, even sold some, some disappeared. I still carried on re-looking at them and perhaps changing some ideas, changing the way I was painting but still with the same theme, again like the cityscapes. The same theme which helps to simplify what you are looking for.
One day, years later, I was down at the river and I turned around saw a similar group of people and realised that it wasn’t a lady but actually a man with a towel around him and so I had imagined or misinterpreted all along thinking it was three women. This made no difference to what I was doing but it put another slant on the whole thing, made me think that it isn’t what you see necessarily it’s what you are doing with what you see that is important. Anyway it’s continuing as time goes by I tend to, now and again pick up where I was as I do with most series and go on a little bit farther with it.
