When I was younger, so much younger than today I never needed anybody’s help in any way. But now these days are gone and I’m not so self assured…

I’ve been looking at this painting. I wrote a post about it when it was finished some months ago, but I’ve already finished it so many times.

(SOUVENIR DE PARIS  oil on canvas. 24″ x 28″)

There was a story that went with the painting: That almost nine years ago I was in Paris sleeping in Patti Smith’s bed (she wasn’t in it and anyway that’s another story).
I used a primitive phone to take a photograph of this female torso; a Greek or Roman sculpture in the Musee Rodin. When I had the photograph printed the colours were quite distorted towards violet and greens but I liked the image and so I used the print as a part of a still life beside an enamel jug and some other objects.
Although I don’t give up easily I could not make the painting work so eventually the canvas joined the pile of other unresolved paintings in a corner of my studio.
I hauled it out every year or so, put it onto an easel, wondered what to do with it and then put it away again, until last year when I stripped almost everything away. I carefully painted out everything apart from the photograph taped to the wall, the light across the shelf and the wall. Then the canvas went back to wait in the unresolved stack.

( stripped down state )

It might have been last Christmas that my daughter’s endless dredging of local charity shops dragged a small turquoise 1950’s (?) vase into the light. The colour seems to work nicely with the curious distorted colours of the photograph and the shape of the neck of the vase fits nicely against the hip and leg of the figure. I tried to add a tall Chinese lemon yellow vase… but that wouldn’t settle so I took that out again and replaced it with small enigmatic boxes.

This is an odd business; painting and being an artist. I choose what it is that I do and how I’m going to do it. I create my own language and grammar and I’m my only judge.

My paintings are poems. I put shapes and colours and images together and I don’t have to know what a painting means but I do have to believe it.

I used to be able to place objects and shapes and colours into compositions so that they belonged. I can’t always describe what it was but I was confident and I could do it. It was something like being able to juggle (although I have never been able to juggle).

Now I almost wish that I hadn’t taken a photograph of the painting last year. I do like the turquoise vase against the torso but… but I’m not convinced. I think I’m going to have to take out the vase and the boxes, to scrape down the surface and try to take the painting back to it’s stripped down state.

I recently heard the author Madeline Miller on Radio 4 talking about her novel ‘The Song of Achilles’. It was about to be published when she decided that the whole book had to be rewritten. Similarly I’m trying to convince myself that this return to an earlier state is not days of work wasted but is a sort of progress; that if I’ve worked another twenty hours on a painting I will better understand the painting even if it looks the same as it did a year ago.

I did made a small painting of the turquoise vase with the boxes.

(Larger Turquoise Pot with Boxes. 16”x18” cat 660)