In my garden is a swinging seat where I can sit quietly. This morning I found a sparrow lying dead in front of it. Like the pigeon before it, its arrival is timely. I have spent most of the day painting it. There is always a distance between intention and outcome, an expression of the distance between the problem and one’s ability to find solutions. I have wondered sometimes about the relationship between originality and forgery. It would be relatively easy to develop a ‘style’ which rendered subject matter in a manner which skirted around the problems. Often work reaches a point at which it ‘appears’ to be art – a stylistic integrity places the work within a ‘tradition’, and technique is all that is there. It is sometimes tempting to stop at that point. This is a kind of ‘forgery’ based upon self deception.
I cannot render the sparrow in all its intricate detail, because I do not have the technical competence, but work towards that end in order to avoid the seductions of style. That struggle and its discomforts then determine the outcome.
