Ever been a sponge- soaked with enthusiasm

Then sucked dry till your bone-hollow and rattling

Ever been a floating ballon- lost in the sky

Then a deflated rubber- limp on the floor

Ever made a ladder- to reach up high

Ten realised you dug a pit- dank, wet and stinking

Ever held a beating heart-pulsing and slippery

Then felt it stop-encrusting, cold and fatty

Ever been full to brimming-sat outside yourself

Then spat it out-a messy descent inwards

Ever been a window-looking out beyond

Then become a wall-shut, closed and suffocating

There collecting paper veils, maps to nowhere,

Taking journeys on crutches which paralyse.

You’ll give them an apple they’ll call it a pear

And they will laugh at the cunning disguise

There building a boat designed to drown

And say ‘you’ll find yourself out at sea’

You want to be King but they’ll make you a clown

Whilst smiling through plastic and drinking their tea.

There making a tower towards nothing at all

They’ll tell me it’s a window when I know it’s a wall

When words will not do,

yet we vomit them out

as if taking the dog for a walk.

Well I have wasted a few

Just fucking about

Abusing the privlege to talk.

When the brain dulls and retards

and the lemons collapse into pulp

When the joker who deals the cards

can’t swallow but drowns in a gulp

Then is the time to sit on your arse

and hide with a mask from the forest of farce

Yea just quickly, have you tried using something other than (frig i can’t remember it) that dull yellow pigment- transparent yellow oxide?!?, for the glazes, i’m just thinking its making them look crusty and old, have you bought yourself any aureolin/cobalt yellow yet? its fanastic, a luminous yellow with a green tint, just like gold if you use it as glazes alongside trans yell, but be more stingy with with trans yell because it has a surprisingly powerful impact and you may be just slightly over doing it.  And also think about getting yourself some nickel azo gold (i think thats right) from golden, it has a brilliant fake antique gold quality to it which may just flip the context of your work on its head, giving it an interesting unexpected twist.  when i was in london i went to an open night for an artist and i think shhe used it when glazing her monochrome ancient civilisation architecture, she then painted small highly coloured gibbons, parrots or vultures in amongst the ruins and it gave them a nice twist.

Firstly, many thanks for the last post Andy, really useful. It follows on nicely from what I am about to say, i think. Had this post written in my head before so going to get it down without trying to address it in regard to your one.

I was thinking about what the point of painting is. I am struggling at the moment with both the what and the how, more specifically the what.

Yet I feel I am moving towards some clarity in my head over the why. I think, as I have waffled on about before, that there are certain permannet truths about each discipline. There most defiantely is for painting and meaning. Painting is about learning the difference between looking and seeing.

 We all start with a particular something, playing around with an image, with a subject, with a narrative, with the medium itself…whatever our content we have a particular something. We build it up synthetically or knock it down analytically. Either way our concern is not merely with aesthetics.

We are actually reaching beyond tangible reality. We are reaching towards those things which are not seen. The metaphyscial, the unseen untouchable zeitgeist. We are attempting to remove those veils of reality, stripping it back to reveal the invisable essence. If we can get a glimpse, however slippery, then we have begun to suceed.

 Reading this back to myself now and realising what a generalised list of statments it is. Shit, the painting aint getting anywhere and even the attempts to theorise it are failing. Still, just had a lovely cup of coffee.

Excuse me if this is a bit of a mess but i can’t fuckin concentrate cos the friggin tv is again blearing away, sucking any existence away in a myre of stodgy routine, have tried to read through your posts, but i’ll restate the concentration is not quite here tonight.

first of all, in response to your question of what i thought about your work when i came down, my first instinct is that you suffer from the same illness as me, and thats not being able to let a painting go, much of your work appeared bogged down in the weight of its own materiality, and i’d just like to see areas of lightness and certainty begin to creep into your work.  Mentioning this, however, my own work has started to lift, and thats come from time painting and growing confidence (sometimes), although i wouldn’t have noticed the problem if rich hadn;t said to me the same thing i’m saying to you now.  I also think it would help you if when you’re painting, you ask yourself whether the mark is right or varied enough, this always helps me when i feel i’m becoming a little mannered. If you’re going to continue with acrylics then get some retarder to slow drying times.  Try to take time to enjoy the full range of the paints qualities, work wet in wet, wet in tacky as well as wet on dry, think about how you can use the tip of the brush, the side of the brush, how you can pull the paint or drag, scrape, drip.  most importantly for you, pace yourself differently.  As for the subject of your current work, i think katherine is spot on (she’s an intelligent lady she is)  certain recurring motifs are interesting, the falling man etc, and can exist separate from the maps, use these motifs cos there’s obviously something there that grabs you, but they’re not surprising me and i like to see something that makes me think about image in a new way, it may be possible to do this through the use of paint but i think a much better way is to broaden the scope and the context, flesh out the universe they exist in because its difficult to empathise with something that has nothing around it to react against,  let him fall onto a goat if needs be, but just give him an end.

I have been pondering the aim of my own work, whilst not thinking too vigorously, for i have been quite enjoying simply painting recently, it’s liberating and i still think you should do more of it.  And i have realised that this does not mean my work is dumbing down, in fact it is gaining in complexity.  An overiding desire of mine I have come to understand is to avoid easy categorisation, this i think is linked somewhat to Gerhard Richter, Kippenberger, Francis Picabia and the like, all of whom felt free to flick between different styles, use widely varying subjects without the desire to try to justify this.  This is contemporary society.  It is diverse and complex and it jars in all areas, within this there is certainly the element of the throw-away-able.  I realise that i want to paint all of this, and i equally believe this is the most difficult thing to do in all of art, and that i’m failing miserably.  What the current crop of talented painters have done (Weischer, Rauch et al) is to unite onto a single canvas what the previous painters had kept as separate pieces, so in fact, when previously this multifaceted approach could be simplified under concepts (one piece is photorealist, another is erotic-kitsch, neo-expressionist etc) these ideologies or non-ideologies could now be assimilated into an overall ouevre or working practice.  Read the Daily Practice of Painting, and think of it as a contemporary Delacroix journal.  Also, i went against your advice to buy the Francis Bacon camera book and instead bought Deleuze’s Logic of Sensation, about bacons art.  i don’t know why i did but i felt it in my gut that i should buy this one, and i think itmay be an inspired choice, only read a couple of pages but its absolutely fantastic, makes me think about painting thesame way ‘what is painting’ did.

 Endnote, i have a show coming up soon.  open night 17th march, probly be difficult for you to come but the invitation is there, gonna email people closer to the time.  will shove some photos up soon but i no longer have photoshop.  Hope you don’t get disheartened by any of the stuff i’ve written, i’ve tried to be constructive but was in a rancid mood so it may have blunted my opinions.

What are we?…

but chancers

Leaping through the windows and crashing into walls

Reaching for a ceiling and setting up our falls

One step up and one floor down

You play conductor and ill become the clown

What were we?

But shadows

Fading into nothing and melting in the past

Dreaming of forever when nothing ever lasts

Two steps forward and two visions lost

The futures irresistable but at what filthy cost?

 Hodgkin, for me, shows what great painting is. Its the ability to make something very sophisticated appear absolutely effotless. The arrogance and spontaneity with which he lays down certain makrs speaks of a man who knows the nature of paint, the construction of space and most intimately colour. Its like he has a relationship with colour with is intelligent, emotive, poetic and utterly undescribaly brilliant. Autumn is, without doubt, a classic example of his strnegths. Colour and form flicker across and up its surface and create pulsing rythms through the picture plane. At points it enters into Bach like musicality. LIke much great painting it performs the trick of marrying, without contradiction, abstraction and figuration.