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.

Towards the end of the year.

Towards the end of the year one wants to look back and see how the work has been developing, trying to see whether there are clues as to direction. I was walking this morning and had to smile:the light was so very sharp and tonal changes severe but at the same time there was a subtlety in the undergrowth that made me realise that there is much to work with . So I stood for a long time just looking with the intention of trying to bring what I was seeing back with me - I had deliberately walked without taking a camera - and use this information to give more layers to the two current paintings.

I came in one morning...

I came into the workshop one morning and realised that it just wouldn't do so I had to remove a lot of what was there and plod on- nothing new I know ,think Auerbach, Kossoff, but never-the-less I needed to change things and this is it for now.

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.