What an artist makes of a painting

.....is less a matter of freely choosing among a variety of options than it is of making the most of a few intuitions that are absolutely of ones own. Every time a painter paints , we want to see what those intuitions are.To paint is to show ones hand. This is from Eye Witness, by Jed Pearl. Basic Books, New York. Autumn 2000.

and from an interview with Gary Wragg, by Emma Biggs: For me there are three sets of things painting does, but all painters do them differently and that's what is interesting. These are: opening out a space or closing it up; making something full or empty and the simple opposition of positive and negative. He says that when he paints he's trying to create a weave of different levels, to get across the canvas leaving no dead areas. This being more about cultivation than expression.

Making anew.

Whilst feeling that I had painted myself out of the previous painting I had this one on the go at the same time and felt that it could be the beginnings of something. I have had it in progress for a while, one of those things that one comes back to without quite being able to pin down its direction : I spent a long afternoon sitting and going back through piles of photographs and reading Auden.

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters,how well, they understood

Its human position;how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

Presence and Object.

Progress was slow, changes incremental in the end. For now though, I am at that point where I think that I have painted myself out of it.

I was hoping for a shift from near lower foreground to upper recessional space in that way that one looks out from what is immediately at hand towards the distance and back again , like when walking or standing watching the wind moving grasses in the distance, whereas at ones feet, the ground is sheltered. Well that is how it developed at one remove whilst the painting itself gave clues as to how to shape the space. In the end it is itself and only may suggest or remind one of something else, part of the way that a painting can be an object and a metaphor.

The progress of a painting.

This painting began in a flurry in August : by a series of additions and deletions I have been trying to move it along to a point of resolution. I have mentioned before that I have a tendency to tinker rather than make a more resolute movement but I know that anything that holds me back because it looks nice will ultimately have to be sacrificed to bring it off. Not dithering, I tell myself, but getting my facts together before making a decision. Watch this space.

Trying to move on.

I've been amused by people trying to turn my paintings sideways all the time and so made this one deliberately horizontal although no doubt someone...........

I will return to the square shortly: actually it allows me the freedom to move around the canvas on the floor and gives the painting more of a chance to influence direction. I think Jackson Pollock often decided very late on which way was up.

Lastly these paintings come out of other paintings which come out of looking but in that there is a lot of failing and rebuilding. Prunella Clough said in an interview once that her failed paintings didn't fail forever, not if there was something in there that would start bothering her again.

Arriving late by way of Constable and De Kooning

There are days when one wonders why it took so long : I have been looking at Constables work again and trying to imagine what it was like for him to be painting , even accounting for reading C.R.Leslie's Life and the letters. Then for weeks now I have had an essay on my desk on De Kooning by Bill Berkson that I have peered at often (wrong spectacles) but didn't read until today when I decided that I had finished my current painting- or painted myself out of it.

The title of the essay is, De Kooning with Attitude and he means for the reader to equate attitude with balance or more probably a balancing act. I liked too that De Kooning said that the idea of space is given to the artist to change if he can and that the subject matter in the abstract is space. Which brought me back to J.C. because that seems to be precisely what comes across, that he was thinking about space, pushing and pulling that lasts perhaps only a couple of seconds, like light, but to me takes on attitude.

Companions

In the making of these two paintings it had not occurred to me that they might be hung together until I laid them out on the studio floor and found them to be visually linked. It is not my usual practice to make a sequence and the paintings do not normally follow one another in any way, rather I try not to let that happen. However, in this case I would like them to be seen together, with the lower of the two here on the left.