Trying to move on.

I've been amused by people trying to turn my paintings sideways all the time and so made this one deliberately horizontal although no doubt someone...........

I will return to the square shortly: actually it allows me the freedom to move around the canvas on the floor and gives the painting more of a chance to influence direction. I think Jackson Pollock often decided very late on which way was up.

Lastly these paintings come out of other paintings which come out of looking but in that there is a lot of failing and rebuilding. Prunella Clough said in an interview once that her failed paintings didn't fail forever, not if there was something in there that would start bothering her again.

Arriving late by way of Constable and De Kooning

There are days when one wonders why it took so long : I have been looking at Constables work again and trying to imagine what it was like for him to be painting , even accounting for reading C.R.Leslie's Life and the letters. Then for weeks now I have had an essay on my desk on De Kooning by Bill Berkson that I have peered at often (wrong spectacles) but didn't read until today when I decided that I had finished my current painting- or painted myself out of it.

The title of the essay is, De Kooning with Attitude and he means for the reader to equate attitude with balance or more probably a balancing act. I liked too that De Kooning said that the idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can and that the subject matter in the abstract is space. Which brought me back to J.C. because that seems to be precisely what comes across, that he was thinking about space, pushing and pulling that lasts perhaps only a couple of seconds, like light, but to me takes on attitude.