I went to St Ives last week. I took lots of sea pictures, many of them sunsets. I cannot resist the colours. I am trying to produce some images that are only just recognisable as sunsets by taking the simplest possible shots that in effect are strips of colour. Although sunset images are flogged to death clichés, the light remains a sensuous suffusion of sky land and water. I am pushing the removal of figurative reference as far as possible in some images. Candyfloss colours simultaneously sweeten the eye and corrupt the mind. Looking at the images some are more immediately amenable to ‘abstraction’ than others. There – abstraction – another formulaic cliché. I thought I was simply enjoying colour, and then in the process of writing I discover that I am doing something unthinkable and confessing to my own crime of pastiche. But if there is truth in Andrew Bryant’s proposition that the question is ‘When is art?’ rather than ‘What is art?’ then the pastiche is capable of a paradoxical life.
