(for Lynne, who might read this)

There is life after lemons. Last month it was endless lemons, now it’s bison. Should it be Bison or Buffalo ?

I was encouraged by the sale of two of my Playmobil compositions at my exhibition in Bedford. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t paint another until I had sold some. I have now sold three and this will be my fifteenth Playmobil painting.

I cleaned up the wall above my shelf with a coat of white emulsion exorcising the ghosts and traces of past Still Lives and then I carefully arranged my herd of Playmobil Bison (all eight) along the length of the Ikea shelf. I tried lots of daft ideas like building up a landscape of different levels and slopes with some books and other junk but I decided to keep the composition simple.

I positioned a cactus exactly on the golden section, for my own pleasure as much as because it often looks right. I wanted that note of colour in the painting but later I felt that it was just too wild and changed the cactus for a Playmobil plastic dead tree stump.

I began a drawing about ten days ago intending to enlarge the finished drawing by 16% with an idea for the composition on a long horizontal canvas, that would be 48” wide and only 18” high, on which the bison will be just a little larger than life size.

Over the past couple of weeks the light hasn’t been good, even for drawing, and the days are too short so I’ve been plodding along, not building any momentum with this project. My drawing became getting heavy in the gloom and I ploughed into the paper.

It was slow and I plodded, like a Bison, along the shelf and the drawing grew. I nailed seven of the beasts and then I decided that there had to be a break in the rhythm of the Bison’s march along the shelf, or it would be about as exciting as a Kitchen Roll. I spent an afternoon trying to remove two of the bison and taking out a pointless box on which I had stood one of the bison just to alter the height.

I also decided that I wasn’t going to get to the ends of the shelf before the distortion became too extreme and the ends of the shelf curled upwards. I changed my plan for the size of the canvas. The new one is smaller, 36″ x 18″.

The way vision works is that what is presented to our brains are countless snapshots which we edit together. Each is only an undistorted cone of no more than 30 degrees on the back of our retina. Outside that small circle what we see begins to distort. I wanted to achieve a sense of the shelf and the bison being an arm’s length away so it was essential to pin down the exact distortion of the shelf. I could have drawn three straight and parallel lines for the shelf and then moved myself along to the left and the right drawing patches of the still life directly in front of me and ‘fudging’, allowing the gaps to absorb the distortion. It might have been a horizontal equivalent of Euan Uglow’s 1967 painting ‘NUDE FROM TWELVE REGULAR VERTICAL POSITIONS’. That would have worked but there would have been no sense of presence, no feeling that you were in front of the shelf, that it was three feet away.

The edited drawing wasn’t as long as the original idea and it was a smaller herd, only six animals. These ‘bison’ are an identical object repeated (not quite true, Playmobil produced two slightly different coloured manes). Everything depends upon the precision of the drawing. Each object has to have a presence in relation to me, my eye. If they aren’t drawn well I might as well have done as my friend Peter suggested and made a rubber stamp or traced a row of identical bison, like an Egyptian frieze.