On the cusp of the year

On the cusp of the year I looked again at the photographs that I had taken in the woods: there was snow all around me and the air was biting, the colours cool and muted. However, in the making of the paintings which spanned the newness of another year the action on the canvas shifted back and forth away from and towards abstraction.

I read a while ( I think it was Susan Rothenberg who when asked if she had had a good day in the studio replied that she had read a good book) , and thought about where the emotive power of some of the past paintings had gone and whether it was possible to bring that elusive quality to the abstraction of the experience of the woodland edge. There is something that I would like to distil from Martin Buber's Presence and Object and work with it or work something of it into these paintings.



small photo




on the cusp of...

oil on canvas 120 x 120

oil on canvas. 120 x 120 cm.