Days,Months,Years almost.

Three paintings and the passage of time: music and silence and finally a new place to make work. One of these paintings was made in a matter of days, one has been almost a year in the making and another I started in May when the barn began to be transformed into the clean white space that it has become. It is here in the silence of afternoons that I can finally see what I'm doing: literally having the space to step back and contemplate and because I also have electricity I can listen to music , Scarlatti, Berlioz, Brahms, Huddonit, and a very moving work by the american composer John Adams, The Transmigration of Souls.

Change

I looked and looked at the painting that I had come to think of as Salabert pool and just couldn't leave it the way it was. Each time I saw it it reproached me. I went out and looked at the site, looked at photographs and did a lot of avoidance therapy,i.e. mowing but it still bugged me that I was falling short in some way. So this is the new version. Its companion gave me hope that I might at last be able to do it differently, for a while at least. The land here-abouts is going through its annual Spring transformation and is impossible to ignore. Alas my reach falls short of the sense of it, the power of it. One has to give it a go though......

Four new paintings

The most recent of these has occupied me for what seems an age but is now in a place where I know that I am tinkering. There is in fact a lot of tinkering in the process interspersed with something more determined -I am reminded that Francis Bacon threw white paint onto a painting just to force it past an impasse- seems I do that a lot, recognising the stall and needing to do something about it. The other three paintings have been in progress for a while too, being revisited and nudged in another direction.

There are great sweeps of light and wind here at the moment but yesterday was calm and hot and the shadows are becoming bolder in the strengthening light. I am trying to pay attention to this or at least to be aware of the fact but working as I do in a confined space it is something that is outside of my room that I am trying to let inside my painting.

Hill at Moa

From my window the cold of snow and minus temperatures connected me to the hill that circumscribes my view. I received new canvasses this week and have started a new painting that I am trying to let have its own direction. Each time I make a painting I try to let go of stuff that I know.

A shield day. The antidote to the black dog.

We call the bright searing blue days here shield days, an admittedly obscure term culled from the Lord of the Rings, riding out. It never fails to work for me.

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.