Nothing concentrates my mind like the impending end of the year. I know its foolish of me but the wholly artificial milestone of the 31st December tipping into January 1st has me frantically endeavouring to tidy up production of work. Given my equally absurd penchant for multiple objectives for my work in the form of various ‘series’ or ‘projects’ this is, as one might imagine, something of a tyranny. So I have three more of the Coastal Banners to complete – will they get resolved? I’m revisiting a host of the Playground Of The Midlands canvases to see if I can put more of them properly to bed. A number of Very Like Jazz follow ups are assuming a more prominent place in the pantheon of T2R2 (those that require resolution) not least because Better Git It In Your Soul is, courtesy of the energetic and exceptionally talented and generous Robert Priseman (who has done so much for Contemporary British Painting) is on tour again in 2019. So I’m thinking this strand of my work that has been quietly bubbling under for the past year needs more of an outing.
And of course I’m heavily into part three of the Landscape & Memory project – Rock – that I’d dearly like to have fully completed by the time the clock ticks over again into 2020 but at my rate of prevarication means quite a lot of cogitation as well as more painting (though mercifully all of them are in play now). Of course I have all those small things that bump along more or less all the time. The Wonky Geo series, now heading north of 60 in total, a set of little abstract landscapy things as yet untitled (and unseen) and two more tiny boxes full of half baked and half realised workouts…oh…and the glacial progress of the i series as above. And just to top it off there’s a host of Paintings Standing Up, experiments in three dimensions, that I cannot for the life of me decide are worthwhile pursuing or not. Yep nothing fogs the mind like the impending Year End!
It’s been quite a while since my last post…more pressing matters plus a short holiday has meant scant opportunity to do so. But I’m also increasingly aware that finding anything worthwhile (to me at least) to say gets harder over time especially as, several years back now, I decided that only painting matters would be discussed here (and I’ve managed to mostly stick to that). So here’s the thing…does time away in other environments affect the outturn of works initially influenced by other impulses and locations? Here’s a Wonky Geo picture (No. 47, if you’re keeping count) that, as regular readers will know, comes from an enormous stack of them that have been on the go, on & off, for several years now. But I just decided it complete, with additions of the past few days since a week in Italy…?
