Working on this series of paintings, I have one eye on Rob Turner’s conversation with Jane Boyer, another on my reactions and responses to this painting, and another on myself as thoughts flip from place to place. Literal and metaphorical eyes seem to change place with surprising frequency, out of the blue. The one thing that is impossible is to prevent the next thoughts from surfacing. Thinking about this central line is like that. Each side is neither one thing nor the other, but each indivisibly bound to the other. The two parts and the division are defiantly assertive, like the thoughts that bubble up, and like the thoughts, they may be trivia, but hopefully with potential. The distance from pleasure to disappointment can be immeasurably short and likewise in the opposite direction, but both journeys disproportionately long. Making a painting plots the comings and goings of feelings, battling and coaxing, concentrating and relaxing. It dawned on me recently that what I had understood as impatience was actually panic. Impatience is a more acceptable condition than panic, and the use of one word rather than another can be an intuitive means of circumnavigating a truth. Impatience does at least imply values, whilst panic might lack moral fibre. At first glance it seems odd that making a painting can involve something as perverse as panic. But panic does not have to be immediately all – consuming. It can arise as control slips away, as a warning sense of unease, and be diverted by focused concentration, and patience even. A story about Patrick Caulfield (which I seem to recall I have used before) returns to mind, who, when painting an image of a well, became aware of a drip of paint that began to run down the picture. His swiftness of response to the drip was prompted by the fear that it would disappear irretrievably down the well. The story was told to illustrate the total absorption that can accompany the act of painting, but it serves also to illustrate the intuitive connectedness that can be freed by it. There is no need of physical threat from the disintegration of a painting; the well of feeling does not differetiate between body and mind. A sense of proportion is what intervenes. When I looked at my image of an orange line across a blue surface, I felt a sense of being at ease, and that this experience at that time was all that was needed. The moment passed and I began to add the flower. I have feelings in common with my images of division, little contradictions, and idiosyncrasies perhaps. Or maybe just delusions of grandeur, a little silly perhaps but maybe beginning to find a direction.
