Last painting of the year - the garden in winter.

The garden, the painting, the time it takes, the outcomes of chance. I have attempted to impose my will on this only to find that , in the end it was I who succumbed. I looked at the living garden, I looked away. I saw light and dark, solid and space and saw only paint and surface. It feels like defeat: another failure and another mark of my limitation.

So what next ? Another go, another approach. In these circumstances what else can we do ? Stop ? Go on ? To go on is all that is left. To stop is to acknowledge that I have wasted my time.

Connections

When I wrote that one might need to know a landscape to paint it I had not thought to wonder how that connection might be made and what it would take to effect it. I don't know any landscape painters, not personally, so I can't ask and would they be any more able to articulate how it happens?

I wonder what moved someone like Thomas Jones to make those small, beautiful paintings in Naples, so unlike his other work? What was he thinking?

I have been making this new painting: I am thinking that the familiarality of this view, a space that I can walk in, be in, think in, is in fact entire of itself and that the connection can only be made by approaching it as Martin Buber suggests in I and Thou. The transforming of what I experience as the spaces and solids, the movement of air, branch and leaf in the garden / landscape into the experience of the painting is as mysterious as ever and a description equally elusive. I feel on that ridge of my own making with all that made by others laid out on either side, observable but unknowable. A connection still to be made.