Competition!!! Having communicated with Phil Illingworth on the subject, it has been buzzing around in my brain ever since. I descend into a kind of madness when the bee gets into my bonnet. As soon as I wake my brain starts. I realised that having raised objections to the notion of competition, I had in fact submitted this painting to the same John Moores open in which his work was accepted. A guilty secret. The bee in my brain stings indiscriminately sometimes, and then suffers embarrassment. However, looking for a little nectar to sustain a few thoughts about competition, my bee discovered that the stinging was not indiscriminate, but that it is repeating itself. The bee that seeks recognition, the bee that seeks power, the bee that seeks status all to an extent seek to repeat memories of success. So what of the hopeful John Moores bee? Some bees are destined to repeat their historic rejections. Disappointment can only be created through false hope, maybe that of the presumptuous, the deluded, the naïve, the misguided, and all the pollen in the world is insufficient for such a bee, whose pursuit of it is the mainstay of his self deception. How do bees become this bee or that? How is it that so many bees, maybe quite talented in a bee kind of way, can live simultaneously with hope and rejection?
