So I began with drawing.

And what followed really was a tussle to both move away from and yet work from the drawing and the others which had proceeded it.

A week has elapsed and I have made some progress but it doesn't seem to be working out quite yet. The fun is in seeing what happens day to day and also in looking back at older work and finding clues that were missed or simply weren't being looked for at the time.

Back to basics.

Focussing on the thing seen as well as the thing experienced has caused me to return to drawing directly from observation and making small paintings. At the moment the drawings are bigger and made with a stick, printing ink and white emulsion. As ever I'm hoping that one thing will feed into the other. To begin with the drawing is descriptive: it then presents me with the problem of how to activate the surface in formalist terms. The paintings vary in what I want from them. I am trying NOT to get too close to what is there (or what I think is there) but the paintings insist on looking like that space, those objects. Nothing wrong with that except that it feels too representational. I am not, I tell myself, translating the outside into paint squeezed from tubes applied to a flat surface to make a painting which refers to light and air, space and solids but is something else entirely, with its own qualities. So back to the drawing board in more senses than one.