What an artist makes of a painting

.....is less a matter of freely choosing among a variety of options than it is of making the most of a few intuitions that are absolutely of ones own. Every time a painter paints , we want to see what those intuitions are.To paint is to show ones hand. This is from Eye Witness, by Jed Pearl. Basic Books, New York. Autumn 2000.

and from an interview with Gary Wragg, by Emma Biggs: For me there are three sets of things painting does, but all painters do them differently and that's what is interesting. These are: opening out a space or closing it up; making something full or empty and the simple opposition of positive and negative. He says that when he paints he's trying to create a weave of different levels, to get across the canvas leaving no dead areas. This being more about cultivation than expression.

Making anew.

Whilst feeling that I had painted myself out of the previous painting I had this one on the go at the same time and felt that it could be the beginnings of something. I have had it in progress for a while, one of those things that one comes back to without quite being able to pin down its direction : I spent a long afternoon sitting and going back through piles of photographs and reading Auden.

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters,how well, they understood

Its human position;how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

Presence and Object.

Progress was slow, changes incremental in the end. For now though, I am at that point where I think that I have painted myself out of it.

I was hoping for a shift from near lower foreground to upper recessional space in that way that one looks out from what is immediately at hand towards the distance and back again , like when walking or standing watching the wind moving grasses in the distance, whereas at ones feet, the ground is sheltered. Well that is how it developed at one remove whilst the painting itself gave clues as to how to shape the space. In the end it is itself and only may suggest or remind one of something else, part of the way that a painting can be an object and a metaphor.

The progress of a painting.

This painting began in a flurry in August : by a series of additions and deletions I have been trying to move it along to a point of resolution. I have mentioned before that I have a tendency to tinker rather than make a more resolute movement but I know that anything that holds me back because it looks nice will ultimately have to be sacrificed to bring it off. Not dithering, I tell myself, but getting my facts together before making a decision. Watch this space.