The greening of trees and mowing.

                                         Greening of trees. No.2. oil on board 126x126cm.    


One of the interesting things about painting is the changes that occur and that they can occur without one realizing. It can be a conscious decision of course but what interests me are those which happen and refer to things which one has thought about but found impossible to put into practice previously.
Then, unbidden, there they are.

This morning I painted: this afternoon I mowed. In the former I added and in the latter I took away. In each case something new was made. Paths were cut shorter between areas of longer grass whilst in the painting I added layers and scraped away sections and was in the landscape in both cases.

I sat on my mower and thought about painting. It didn't seem surprising that the one thing could be like the other. I thought about how mown grass that is so often uniformly flat becomes richer for being cut at different heights and how light and movement affects it. It is so like making a painting: enriching a surface building it up, scraping away, making use of chance, letting the accidental suggest a new direction.