15 Nov – Woke later this morning – regretted briefly that I’d missed precious time. The house is so peaceful, the sea slow, flat, gentle, the waves the colour of old green glass. I was awake in the night, thinking about what kind of work would come out of this time.
Went to Tate to see The Indiscipline of Painting: abstraction and contemporary abstraction. Interesting to see the commonalities and the differences – the same experimentation with contemporary painting media ; industrial paints, aluminium, expanded foam, but an added awareness of the complex, layered nature of our daily perception, borrowings from the street, the everyday.
I unashamably love beautiful work, and find most abstract work reductive – it doesn’t engage me long enough . I hadn’t seen Andy Warhol’s eggs before, and liked the tiny rough edges where the print met the flat paint. Tiny little points of interest.
Later – saw a Chough outside, on the wall. It croaks (if that is the word to describe it) in a squeaking, indignant way, as if begging attention. They were common all across Britain; Canterbury has three choughs on its coat of arms, we don’t see them in Kent any more. There are plenty of Ravens along the cliffs, too.
16 Nov – time is getting shorter – I’m reluctant to go home to the mess of daily life, to other people’s problems which are by extension, my own.
It rained all day, quietly and steadily, reminding me of when I was little, on the rare occasions when I was at home with just my mother, in the warm – maybe drawing or painting, watching the rain run down the windows. Feeling safe.
It was a good day to work, and to think about time, and dreams, and Henri Bergson, or at least, his ideas.
If our memories are stored in Time, a kind of ‘soup’, everything we’ve experienced of equal weight until we conjure it into the moment, what are dreams? And if the ‘Real’ is duration, a ‘continually-becoming’, what happens when we dream? Are dreams more similar to ‘intuition’? And what, for that matter is intuition? It’s not the sum of our remembered experience, so where does it come from?
I set up an experiment: what if I tried to make a series of sketches by simply making one mark in response to a previous one? Is it even possible? – I found my attention wandering, calculating the next mark, judging the last one…Resigned myself to an imperfect process.
In the evening the wind buffeted the house – the rain poured down.
17 Nov – two more days left.
The sea has returned to its powerful self, waves crashing in, covering the cove in skeins of white foam, smashing against the rocks in huge sprays. I shall miss its rhythm, which has slowed my heartbeat** and fills me with intense excitement when I try to get The Ultimate Shot, nearer and nearer, without getting soaked through. I never do, of course, it constantly eludes me.
Today I can see across to Sennen Cove again, and the lighthouse shows very clear in the dawn light.
