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.

Editing

This , from Sister Wendy Becket's interview with the American painter, Robert Natkin. In a reply he says that he doesn't see a difference between what is and what could be. In the finality of it the editing process is what he thinks a person (Becket) might call prayer and which in his case is considered the editing process of how he can make all aspects of his life be of some positive value. This strikes a cord in that life is not a narcissistic thing beginning and ending with oneself, but rather an engagement with humanity - approached with humility, nakedness even.

Bicci di Lorenzo

In the Ashmolean museum at Oxford there is a little painting by this Florentine artist, depicting a scene from the Life of St. Nicholas. The work can be seen to be divided more or less in two halves of light with the arrival of the saint, and dark, where the sky merges with the sea and the horizon is less clear. The sailors appear to be throwing something overboard , perhaps their belongings , perhaps something else. In three paintings that I made a few years ago I focussed on this object: there are times when something strikes me and there is a confluence of ideas that I need to respond to . I tried to do this here. In the history of my family there is an incident of incarceration, a straight jacket, a loss. I was already working with this when this beautiful painting was shown to me.

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.