Dead and dying flowers

The sun shone today. I picked up a pencil and felt energised. The Coaltit is doing well to ‘survive’ this long. Sometimes I can happily draw with hardly a care.



This painting has had a number of ‘lives’

Life One was an abstract surface and line ‘Yes but what is it about?’

Life Two ‘Yes but I Still don’t Understand’ I enjoy the sensuality of paint. It ought not to bother me. This was an attempt to develop the bird painting series. It was problematic from the start. Life One was not initially intended as a support for Life Two, but was adopted as a possibility. Life Two had a simpler appearance, but the greys were dead; my heart was not really in it.

The bird imposed upon it never felt right. Lives One and Two were incompatible.

But I didn’t want to ‘waste’ what I had done or the time that I had spent on it. I find it very difficult to throw things away. I have boxes of nuts and bolts, bits of plumbing, offcuts, on shelves in my shed, that one day might find a use. Who is to know what might become of nuts and bolts and dead birds?

Life Three came about with a short burst of sunlight and a shadow in my workshop. A motif of bars was introduced , but again sat awkwardly. Another layer gave birth to Life Four, this time with more contrast. Five vertical bar-like lines partially overlaid with cloudy greys allowed the birds to float free. One for the shelf? Life Four ‘This is an Acorn.’



I have found myself in the doldrums recently. Bird and line have become moribund? How to revive? Keep going. If there is some underlying motivation for this work, to continue will test its capacity for renewal. In the meantime there remains only technique?

The process is one of feeling, perhaps an impotent desire for the bird to sing once more? Might it sing by proxy, drawing as a drawing – out of silenced song, hearing with the eye? One day, perhaps.