I am very aware that I have not written much up here recently. Reasons for this seem to be three fold.

Firstly the dull reality of life, in that other things get in the way.

Both the other reasons are more directly linked to my practise.

 I have been working on small ’sketch’ like paintings for a little while now. The freedom it brought has certainly helped me make some steps forwards. I think forwards, at the least some steps in a direction.

It became clear that certain areas were developing which were calling out to be explored in a more considered and larger scale format. Groups were forming which each require at least one attempt at a larger articulation.

 Swimmers/floaters, protagonists with faller, fallers and windows/walls. Yet I seemed paralysed, in capable of making the choice as to which elements form which sketches would provide the structure for larger works.

I started to do a sereis of small sketches which attempted to harness the strengths of various other sketches, in order to make choices for the larger works.

This was flawed on two levels. Firstly my painting searches for, and works best when it has only pointers for the end, not unbreakable structures. Secondally I was delaying the need to be brave, to just start, to jump into the unknown. Procrastination at its worse.

On Tuesday I finally took the jump. Four larger works have begun and seem to be drawn from but not obsessively reliant on the sketches which precede them. The five canvas awaits as the faller and flaoter works (of which it will be one) have not reached any form of clarity in the sketches yet.

 The paintings being worked on are as follows:

 1) ‘The pink lady and the faller’, based on two sketches of the same name. I have alreadyt made some deviations on the colour rnage which worked so well int he sketch. It is started to provide a platofrm to explore the range of colours and surfaces which I have been searching for. Hopefully these can corolate to the nature of emotive charge I am aiming for in the combination of forms.

2) ’The Blue Walking Lady and three spinning men’. Certainly proof of the other elaboarte planning process in other works. The sketch for this work kind of came form nowhere. The figure and frames are from a newspaper cutting I have had for ages and the three figures (which now fill the frames) are of the footballer Nani at various stages in an acrobatic goal celebration. The organisation of space is something I am already happy with in this work, it has a certain riguour which I think works. In terms of subject matter I am perhaps a bit uncomfortable with it. It is perhaps the most personal of my works since ‘Adonis lies…’.

3) Swimmer. An overly planned work. Six sketches were made and then a further six attempted to bring together the strangths of the first six. I gave up on these as I realised I was overthinking things and constraining the process. The picture, just in its early stages, will hopefully liberate itself from this.

 4) ’Horse between somewhere and nowhere’ A horse moving between two spaces, which shall be of formally opposing types (colour, tone, surface). Already a gorgeous jammy surface on the right which will need to be destroyed for the picture to function sucessfully. I imagine I will procrastinate for a long time before bring myself to do that. But at the moment its an empty surface aesthetic, serving no purpose.

These last brief descriptions reveal the last reason for my lack of writting. Having cast of the shackles of other thinking the sketches I have managed to engage in the actual act. I don’t feel to much of a need to analysis this in writting to any great degree. But perhaps that is what I am now doing. Whoops