How long does it take ?

garden 21:01:18

brief sunlight 09:01:18

I was being asked this morning (a not entirely serious question I suspect ), how long I worked on a painting. I can't tell: days, weeks, months, years sometimes. Of course some of that is thinking time and some of that thinking time is whilst I am engaged with something else. It must include walking; reading;

revisiting a painting; looking at other artists work. I really like to look at Sienese painting which does not seem to have anything to do with what I do but I admire them and always go to see them in the National Gallery in London.

These paintings on paper have been rather rapid for me, a few days work at most, a lot of scraping off as usual but never the less completed within a week. It hardly matters how long it takes or rather it takes as long as it takes.

I have a friend who enjoys her painting. I have seen her working for twenty years or so and watched her confidence build. She sent me an e-mail with her new ones and here they are:

Miri Felix, Thank you.

Three paintings, Early January, William Hazlitt.

10:01:18

05:01:18

01:01:18

There is something about following a path. It becomes a thread, a link, something exploratory, full of history, full of connections.

William Hazlitt wrote; I can saunter for hours, bending my eye forward, stopping and turning to look back, thinking to strike off into some less trodden path, yet hesitating to quit the one I am on, afraid to snap the brittle threads of memory.

In working on these paintings, I have tried hard to snap that thread but it is proving tough to do. The connections with my view are still there even though every time it starts to look like landscape I paint it out and start again. Perhaps, if in an imaginary exhibition, all that I have done could be seen, the thread would still be there. 

It was said of him that he had but one painting in him and he painted it again and again.