With my beachcombery attitude to this stuff, I keep on picking things up until it gets too dark and cold, and then look in the bag to see what the day’s tides have thrown up. Smudgy paint, thin, drawing that changes, evolves? Working with rolled – up pieces of old t-shirts, cleanly defined fine distinctions being difficult, only longer sharper boundaries and borders are possible for me. Beak and feet pose the biggest problems, birdy details demanding to be structured appropriately. Consistency of touch will hold whatever it turns out to be, together. Like the good-enough mother, the good-enough painting as the best that might be hoped for, is what I hope for. My painter is not presently good enough; the stuff in the bag remains in ever-present danger of being returned to the sea when the light goes and cold closes in. This particular bag of pigeon and paint is just about sustaining me through the mental and physical cold weather that exists at the moment.
I notice as I sit here writing, that the sun is out. The sun comes out periodically in my daubing too. A smudge of paint suddenly seeming to light up the thing with a pertinent contrast or harmony; somewhere along the line there may be a painting to be had. I’m working with the t-shirt material stretched over my finger tip, rubbing and dabbing the paint – it hadn’t occurred me yesterday. The painting, if it is to be there might just emerge from my tidal sediments as the tip of something. My beachcomber must be alert to the clue; false alarms seem to be the order of the day, periodic excitements rising and fading. But just along there somewhere….. might be a dull example of grey English stuff….Back to the beach tomorrow. What was yesterday below the surface might now just be emerging.
