Frank Gordon
Frank Gordon is a landscape painter who graduated from Bolton College of Art in 1963, before embarking on a successful art teaching career spanning over thirty years. After taking early retirement, he moved to the village of Giggleswick in the Yorkshire Dales National Park.
Most of his subject matter relates to scenes within a few miles of home (especially the Three Peaks area of Ribblesdale) with frequent visits to the Lake District and Scotland. His paintings seek to recall the intensity of first-hand experience through painterly concerns of colour and form. He works in a full range of painting media, enjoying the varied qualities that each brings to the picture-making process.
Frank always begins with directly observed drawings (over the years he has filled more than sixty sketchbooks) which, supplemented with photographs, form the basis for the making of the finished work.
That’s the case in all the paintings shown here; each is the result of close initial study followed by the usual process of painting and repainting in the studio when memory and invention come into play.
It sometimes seems to me these days that the art of painting is actually the art of making mistakes and correcting them, then correcting the corrections. A process of refinement, I suppose. You start with an idea and from there on, it is a process of chasing it down until it seems ‘right’. Or as right as it can be, anyway. The aim is that the spectator experiences something of the sensations I experienced initially – with (or through) the added bonus of the aesthetic qualities in the painting.
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