New paintings in winter.

                                        

                                                              oil on canvas. 50x50cm.

  I am making a painting, a collation of lots of photographs, and of memory and to begin with, it is too pretty, too close to the subject, to the sight seen of trees at the edge of the wood in sunlight and not at all what I want. It does not strike me as painting: it seems like it is too easy to make something that appears clever and there are already too many clever paintings around. So I repeatedly paint it out and begin again thinking about what painting is and trying to marry my experience of being there with constructing a painting which is about marks, shapes, colour, line, mass etc.

                                       

                                     oil on canvas.80x80cm.

                                         

                                                                        oil on paper. 30x30 cm

                                      

                                                                            oil on paper. 30x18cm.

Winter is a time for reflection: a time to pull out the past years work for review, to decide what is worth keeping and what is not. These last few years I have made a book at the years end to record some of the things that I have done which means that I don't have to keep the paintings and can re-use them, for when all is said and done, they are simply surfaces to think on.