A word from Ruskin.

Shower.(Passover). 120x120cm. oil on canvas.

"While form is absolute....colour is wholly relative. Every hue throughout your work is altered by every touch that you add in other places.... In all the best arrangements of colour, the delight occasioned by their mode of succession is entirely inexplicable. Nor can it be reasoned about. We like it, just as we like an air in music, but cannot reason any refractory person into liking it if they do not. And yet there is distinctly a right and a wrong in it, and a good taste and a bad taste respecting it, as also in music."

At this time of year there is a vividness and sharpness to colour here: the air is very clear. It reminds me of Spring days in England when the smell of rain is in the air - though the light is softer there I think. The above painting was made on the floor and only moved to the vertical at what seemed the last minute and like most of my painting , may well change yet before I show it in an upcoming exhibition: whether it lasts the year will depend on how much I need the canvas.

Painting from Nature.

John Constable. Dedham Lock,1820-25 oil on canvas on wood. 16.5x24.5cm

David Blackburn. Leaf Coast.1999. pastel on paper. 50x38cm.

Thomas Jones.Buildings in Naples. 1782.oil on paper.

Rain clears from the west. oil on wood panel. 120x120cm.

From an article by Merlin James:

What does it mean to give an accurate, Matter-OF-FACT description of the world or part of the world or something in the world? When I try to describe objectively what I perceive in front of me, or around me, how far in fact am I giving an account of myself, of my own impressions? How do I set limits on what I choose to describe? How do I decide what is the focus of my attention and what is incidental or "background". How much has to be asked - or left unquestioned- about the language I use in order for my description to be comprehensible, believable?.....and why make a copy of appearances at all if not in the anticipation of the absence of the "original"

I was in London recently and among the many images that I have carried with me since is a painting by Thomas Jones, made in 1782, in Naples. It was small and perfect and I would love to have it: but more, I would have loved to have made it.

I show another of his here, together with two pieces which have also had a similar impact, and a new one of my own.

Picture for an exhibition.

untitled. oil on wood. 120x120cms.

There is to be an opening exhibition for La Tour, Montsales, 2011 season and I hope to take part in this with other local artists. It is a very small village but the exhibition space, has attracted a large audience in the two years that it has been operating. In this part of the Aveyron there are a number of excellent exhibition spaces with a variety of work being shown in and around Villefranche de Rouergue, Cajarc, Rodez, and Toulouse.

A walk in progress

After rain. oil on canvas, 80x80cms.

untitled. oil on canvas. 80x80cms.

after rain 2 , oil on canvas. 80x80cms.

These three paintings are an extension of the idea of what one can bring back from the solitary walk. In the case of these the walk was not far, a matter of yards in fact. However the experience of one thing gives rise to another. The paintings will in time, I hope develop: they are small 80x80cms but could be, should be, much bigger. I can't at the moment remember who told me that small shows you what you can do and big shows you what you can't - referring to markmaking - but it is something to think about.

Museings

Walk. oil on canvas. 150x110cm.

Contemplating a painting constitutes a pause from daily life , an external and an internal pause: the making of the painting is in itself part of daily life . In this painting the subject matter which I think of as having derived from the act of walking is frozen, a moment in time which has given rise to an action which has resulted in an object for contemplation and in fact, in contemplating this painting I know that it will prompt me to look again and change what I have done.

I read a poem by Derek Hyatt:

It is the space that matters most.

The line opens the space between objects. The line moves; the frozen objects change, melt.

The line is life and an image of time cutting space.

The line can be moved

there -

more visible than the trees, clouds and walls.

The line celebrates the mind moving across the

landscape.

The line is the birds flight through the tree, cross the hillside and up to the invisible ledge

of the cumulus cloud.

Follow me, cries the line

Draw into me, cries the blue

Slice me in two, cries the yellow

Criss-cross my surface, cries the red

Bind us together, cries the lover.

a

Transience to permanence- of sorts.

Late afternoon (Red Centre) 120cm x 120 cm

oil on canvas.

Making work from found objects is not new: Prunella Clough springs to mind ; Henry Moore; Andy Goldsworthy but in the case of working with things seen, even transiently I came across the practice of Graham Sutherland. He said, The things one reacts to vary. I myself have sometimes noticed a juxtaposition of forms at the side of a road, and on passing the same place next week they are gone. It was only at the original moment of seeing that they had significance for me. In the studio I remember; it may be an hour ago or years , and I react afresh. The images dissolve; objects may lose their normal environment and relationship. It is the element of the accident and the accidental encounter which is important.

I have been thinking about this: accident, accidental encounter, taking place before and during the work in progress. The way that the work evolves , the attention to the intuitive and the planned construction are equally important and I'm thinking here of Wilhemina Barnes Graham saying that none of her marks were unplanned, but I can't help the fact that at the moment my painting proceeds from the casting of the first marks, as a construction, as a painted surface first and an invitation to the observer second.

New year painting

This is the first piece of the new year and accompanying it is the last painting of the old year, tinkered with: I feel that tinkering has improved it. As I have mentioned before, this inability to leave things alone is part of my way of painting, re-working; re-using; revealing both uncertainty and the confidence to re-use work to try to get at what I want. I suppose that the nub of the problem is precisely that of having ideas and trying to make them work. In these paintings I feel that I am trying to say something about the sorts of spaces that we inhabit. With landscape it is tempting to moralise in the way of American painters of the nineteenth century or invite a cultural reading of the environment. It is true that nature is violent, true that in the midst of Arcadia there is destruction but what has this to do with the making of a painting that derives from nature? We are, it is. I observe it and take something for myself to use whilst all the while it, is indifferent.

Some while ago now the painter Jake Berthot said that "Making paintings is kind of like being a snake. a snake sheds its skin once in a while and so does a painter. The difference is that the snake is still a snake but the painter doesn't know what shape he is - one time he is shaped like a dump truck and the next he's shaped like a butterfly." I would say that nature is still nature: I might add that it knows nothing of what we call landscape.