Rob and Jane, thank you, why use a small knot when a big one will suffice? When painting goes well for me it seems to settle into a rhythm that simply needs following; when it goes badly it a disproportionate amount of energy is needed to overcome it. I carried on with this to see where it would lead. As I was working, the sun shone briefly through a blind in my studio, casting a shadow across one of the images. It gave the impression of the bars of a cage. For a moment I was back, a child in my Grandmother’s front room, light flowing through the bars of her budgerigar cage. A possibility flickered in the ‘shadow cage’. The reason that I disliked the painting was to do in part with the spaces in it. They lacked tension. The cage offered an approach to the problem. And the juxtapositions seemed resonant. I was trying to introduce some kind of dynamic through the use of several images, and through the juxtaposition of flat with descriptive painting. I think I know what you mean about the singular image.
As regards working theories, questions and answers, the work is the only theory I have. (The answer frames the question?) It is a bringing to the surface of something through the business of looking and feeling, around subject and materials? There is no theory in it beyond an accumulation of experience and reflection. There is an important sense in which I don’t know anything about anything.
Over the past month or so I have been revisiting this difficulty of meaning and relevance, mainly because as I have noted, I frequently find myself uncomfortably at odds with the judgements of others, and wonder why this should be. And it must have a bearing on my painting.
I like the idea of being ‘tied in knots and coming out back to front!!!’ Writing this stuff is a tangling experience! I do find my predicament perversely amusing.
We have lots of fatballs and seeds out for the birds in our garden . Wood pigeons, collared doves, sparrows, blackbirds, and starlings, feed. Bluetits dart back and forth. The robins have stayed away. Occasionally a squirrel competes. I watch them as I work. I guess my birds have had lives like the ones you see from your kitchen. My mother-in-law’s cremation took place on Friday. People and birds.
