Interface.

Interface. oil on paper on board. 100x68cm.

The capacity of some paintings to connect with our physical memory of spaces and objects allows us to respond to something out there: something which is also inside us; what a friend of mine calls wholeness. It is the immediacy of the visual world which allows this so poignantly, that resonates enough to register a start of recognition. There in our memory is that place, that moment , one we may have long forgotten or if not forgotten, recognized as lying fallow, distant, hidden beneath layers of our daily concerns and conflicts but waiting, waiting to reconnect.
Merleau-Ponty, writing of Cezanne, says that the artist is the one who arrests the spectacle in which most of us take part without really seeing it and it was he, Cezanne, who wanted to make visible how the world touches us.


Francis Ponge , writing in 1947 of La Cruche.

The singularity of the jug is thus to be at once ordinary and delicate: so in some way precious. And the difficulty, involved in its very being, is that one must -for that is also its character- make use of it every day. We have to grasp the ordinary object (a simple intermediary, of little value) place it in daylight, handle it, set it in motion, clean, fill, empty.


Memory and the everyday, an interface between where we are and where we and others have been. It seems a fit a subject for painting, something to address, something which can be overlooked and yet which has infinite richness.

Between times.

                                                  oil on board. 26x20cm.


Between working out ideas for other things I return again to trying to deal with painting myself. Each time it is different, so much changes over the days weeks or months and years that it can take. Lucien Freud is reported to have said that working over a long time on a portrait is like trying to hit a moving target.

New painting in Spring.

                                           Exquisite greening of trees. oil on wood panel. 120x120cm.


It seems so surprising when an image gels as if from nowhere. I made this painting after standing looking at the garden and then leafing through photographs and collages that I had made earlier. Nothing stood out and in fact I was working on a self portrait when I knew, all of a sudden what to do.
So, Hildergard of Bingen, if you are out there I can only say thank you.

So here I am.

“So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years-
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux geurres-
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learned to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate,
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered,
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate – but there is no competition –
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.”


Four Quartets.T.S.Eliot.

Ploughing.

Surface. oil on canvas. 60x46cm.

Merging. oil on canvas. 66x55cm.

Traces. oil on canvas. 160x120cm.

I have an exhibition approaching: the catalogue is being prepared. At some point someone will ask me to explain and I will want to say,want to excuse myself, to say that I am no good at talking about it. The work is what it is and there is no hidden meaning to be hinted at or discovered.

The French will say that one is inspired by: they know what they mean but I am not inspired, not moved to paint by something. What I do is what anyone might do. I paint. I might, in another life, plough.

Oh there is no doubt in my mind that this might be insufficient. That were I to embrace some doctrine, some ism, I might be assured of my direction and be able to promulgate my ideas but this would make for a safe passage and a certainty that would sit ill with me. So, I paint what I am and the paintings are what they are.

I follow my plough.

Birthday portrait at sixty six.

February, not April, is the cruelest month.

 I read recently that the desire to flatter remains even in the self portrait though the pressure to make a likeness is less than when painting another. True or not there will be arguments for and against. I looked through my portraits over the years recently: flattery was absent.

February, bad back, introduction.

It's February and that seems to mean bad back days. So, continuing to work on this painting means incremental changes and the steady accretion of marks. Amid the pain is pleasure: I can only do this for a few minutes at a time but that does allow for a mad overpainting where to be sure one is not in control much of the time, and the steady touch, touch of the mark, before needing a nice lie down. In the meantime I can read what other people are thinking. There is Painting Perceptions to look at and I drop in on Sharon Knettels Painting from Life. Ilaria Rosselini Del Turco keeps me grounded and in addition I have been keeping an eye on Dean Melbourne - A PaintersBlog.
I am interested in the truth: I would like to quote from Martin Buber, where he told a story about Rabbi Zusya. who said " In the world to come I shall not be asked why were you not Moses?"I shall be asked "Why were you not Zusya?"
I am asking always why I am not me.