Black Dog Day

Who knows why such days come along from time to time…  It was the writer Peter Redgrove that coined this term when I was one of his students in Cornwall many years back.  He swore blind that when you entered Cornwall over the Tamar a black dog jumped on your shoulder and sat there until you left the county!  Quite what he had against the place I never did find out.  It reminded me of another recollection of my student days…

My online friend Andy Parkinson recently mentioned a previous blog of mine in which I checked some Patrick Heron pictures…I reckon this might be one of them…

And when I think of him battling away across this surface with the No.2 watercolour brush swishing oil colour onto a canvas over two metres long I realise that I haven’t got so much to complain about…though in my defence the shapes are both more complicated and pre determined.  Having said that I recall Heron saying that he drew out the shapes and filled in the colours discreetly too.

So today everything seemed just a little off colour and every action seemed a little clumsy… at one point culminating in a quadruple cock up…the paper on which I was drawing slipped, as I grabbed at it I knocked the radio flying and moving over to retrieve it I tipped over a canvas that in turn saw me spilling the paint onto the floor.  Almost a Fischli/Weiss ‘event’!

‘So It Goes’ as the great man said…