Keith Jarrett, black dog, Phaidon et moi>

Last night I was explaining the black dog to two very articulate french friends with wide ranging interest in the arts. I can't explain the reason for, or the place from which the black dog comes but Keith Jarrett says that he tells his piano students that if they are going to play, they should play like its going to be the last time. That is what I try to think about - make the painting as if it is the last time. Hence I think, the black dog, because as he also says, it is NOT natural to (in his case) sit at a piano,bring no material,clear your mind completely of musical ideas and play something of lasting value.

In my case trying to clear the mind of painterly ideas is mostly too much to achieve and that's when I feel that it should be the last time. But as my friend last night asked, then what? There will, in fact be a last time and not to have made the commitment to try will truly have been a waste.

However, there is something in my head that nags at me - it is there and not there, a call to jump perhaps towards the next place. And I fear it ( I've looked at that word fear hard for a while now , in isolation a word can look strange) and the jumping is the very thing that I take clearing the mind (in Keith Jarrett's case) to mean. Every action, every mark made, is made because I know its history so finding a new mark or gesture is a jump to a place that I have not been before. It's a journey away from the comfortable but predictable architecture of marks.

I was looking for examples of those who have jumped, or stumbled, amongst the plates of Phaidon's Book of Twentieth Century Art and these friends seized upon it and took it away with them as they had never seen it before. How, I wondered later, could they have missed it?

Cruciform shadow

After thinking about being in the woods and waiting for the sun to break through the recent leaden skies, I realised that I had the makings of the kind of painting that I was carrying in my head already.

Last Spring I had begun a piece and it niggled me all year that I hadn't been able to resolve it . It was there but not there: often it is like that and one knows that the thing one wants is out there, it's just hiding a while. I ask myself why that is: why is it not possible for me to see the future and get it right first time.

One answer is that the process is what is important, the thing that must be worked through, revised and reworked. I don't know what it is like for a poet for example, but there will be those who will recognise that feeling at the end of the working session, that it has gone well only to see it afresh the next day and realise how horribly wrong one can be.

I was talking with a painter once about the process and he told me that he liked beginning and he liked the end but it was the middle which gave him the problems.

On the cusp of the year

On the cusp of the year I looked again at the photographs that I had taken in the woods: there was snow all around me and the air was biting, the colours cool and muted. However, in the making of the paintings which spanned the newness of another year the action on the canvas shifted back and forth away from and towards abstraction.

I read a while ( I think it was Susan Rothenberg who when asked if she had had a good day in the studio replied that she had read a good book) , and thought about where the emotive power of some of the past paintings had gone and whether it was possible to bring that elusive quality to the abstraction of the experience of the woodland edge. There is something that I would like to distil from Martin Buber's Presence and Object and work with it or work something of it into these paintings.



small photo




on the cusp of...

oil on canvas 120 x 120

oil on canvas. 120 x 120 cm.

The way it goes.

It begins with looking and looking begets walking and walking begets thinking.

I don't take my camera with me each time because I think that I might become too reliant on it and stop looking but there will be times when I want to use it and looking ahead can begin to imagine the image, whole and collaged. It might be a simple thing like here, or more an attempt to set down bits of the walk. There are lots of tracks around here that only a few people use. Anyway the paintings begin this way at the moment. Begin with a sense of the place and then move on to develop an independent place of their own.

I,ve been asked how it is that I can so readily overpaint them and the answer is simply that the doing is what matters, the experience: then I move on.

Last painting of the year.

I've been working on this five by four foot painting for a while: the surface is very different to the previous work and again quite different to my current painting which is much thicker in material and texture. I have started to collage my black and white woodland photographs: it is these new photographs that have provided source material for this painting. I have a mental picture of this painting on the facing entrance wall to my new studio and should the building actually get done in the coming year I'll be very happy indeed.

This one is for Ron.

I worked this some more , adding the grid and altering the bottom a bit but one has to stop somewhere and move on to something else which I'll show later. I still think that I am being too timid. And my favourite of the week is Carmen Herera, 94 years old and still painting:see the New York Times article.

Salabert, morning,afternoon, John Stewart Collis.

Amongst the many books and periodicals in the small cellar in which I paint,I refound the Vision of Glory by JSC and began again to move back and forth among his ideas : part 111 is entitled The Revenges of Nature. He writes,There seems to be inherent wisdom in the workings of Nature. Man is a late arrival on the scene of natural operations. In this instance that wisdom is hard to discern. It is as if a bird had laid a bomb instead of an egg.

I can't tell if this painting is one or the other. I've posted it as it stands now and will let you know when it changes.