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This blog will be continued as lostedges.tumblr.com

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Finished now. I couldn't have asked for more, from Jac, my tutor, or from myself. It is sad to leave and I will miss this place. Time, though, to use what I've learned. Onwards...

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In progress. A frustrating month, teaching 5 days a week, with little recourse to the Cardiff studio. Busy at home though

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The hammer. Similar themes, in origin, to the collograph print below I made 20 years ago. Death of a way of life and a way of work.

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industrial workers in domestic employment

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He cut the veil of the rock; the hooves clattered the bellowing

waters below him in the dark. The lamp brought the moon from the

blade, and the blade the bull from the rock. The ice rang.

He took life in his mouth, spat red over hand on the cave wall.

The bull roared.

Boneland, Alan Garner

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In progress......" I sat upon the shore

Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

Shall I at least set my lands in order?"

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The act...

There is a shaped stick. At one end are fastened hairs, bristles; tied, shaped and clamped tight in pursuit of unity, although they may not be used to this end. In the hand of the user the stick is familiar, as comfortable and unfelt as the hand itself. It becomes an extension of the body, for which it is a transmitter, translator for all it feels and knows. It is pressed into dust. First the dust, coloured dust of earth or stone, is floated in the fat of plants. The oil is clear, thick, fluid. It is amber or straw, yellow as the sun that formed it's substance. It holds the light again as it once did. The dust floats, suspended, and the light passes through oil and dust and meets our eye again, altered. The oil and dust dry hard and clear. Like coloured glass. When wet it clings to the hairs on the stick, and the hand that moves, presses to a bed of wood, cotton, linen. Firm or slow, it is a lover's touch. It has been repeated, a thousand times, across years of this hands growing, and the moving body is written with a lifetimes knowledge that in each tiny, purposeful turn or push, guides the brush. It is a magic of dust. Of dirt. Of light, of oil, of sticks, hairs, eye, mind and the body. All that has been written, printed, imprinted, infused, ingrained in the body. These together, so that one grain from that field may be harvested: and looked at.

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What's the point?

What's the point, scoffs my brother in law, in painting an old hammer head? I think, probably, that explaining why, in the work, without presupposing a crummy essay, statement or explanation to do the work for me, is entirely the point of painting anything.

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Hammer, in progress

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Studies from home

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Studio......

Taking some time to clear my home studio, in the extra time I have available in the summer. I'm aware that in December I'll have to relocate the work from Cardiff and there's currently nowhere for it to go. My studio is big enough when clear, but over the last ten years or so I've accrued a lot of debris. In addition to this it is a place that gets used to alleviate space questions from the house, so I'm having to be disciplined on a number of fronts. It is good to clear the space. Seen as an extension not so much of my living space as an extension of myself, it is an area that I've allowed to become shoddy, cluttered and uncared for. Clearing it, making useful again, respecting the space and the opportunity it represents is important if I'm to paint beyond the new year. There is a past to put away. Old paints, no longer fit for purpose, projects started and abandoned, work of value to be stored. It is wholesome and necessary. I am working in the day and painting in the evening, on both fronts around the demands of family, who are also glad to make use of the extra time with me. It is the beginning of a next stage, which I want to get right, knowing that time, once I step on the moving train of work in September, will be in short supply.

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Two day portrait, first day from life, the second day refining and developing from memory and photographs.

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Between 2 worlds

'one chance out between two worlds, fire, walk with me'.

As I get older, I'm increasingly doubtful of the nature of reality. I recently played a virtual reality game with my son. I travelled on a spaceship, climbed ladders, met strange beings. When I came out of the headset I had the strangest feeling - not that the game was so real, but that reality was so similar to the game. There are areas of contemporary science suggests an underlying fabric of the universe which is somehow linked to consciousness. In other studies it also appears to be pixelated. Existence is a strange affair. Do we see reality as such? Our brains hallucinate a translation of sensory information, that best allows us to navigate survival. There is much we don't see, psychologically, physiologically. We have conscious lives, unconscious lives. Our relationship to reality is conditioned by consensus, in some respects what the Sufis call the 'commanding self', Castaneda, the first ring of power. It is further mediated by memory, taste, temperament. We see what we choose to see in many ways. In turn as painters we select how to describe. If seeing and experience are derived from the doubtful relationship between interior and exterior worlds, can painting ever be purely mimetic? In Nolan's Inception, once an idea takes hold, it can soak through every layer of your life, and the idea ' is my reality REAL?' is persistent and somehow central to the motivation of painters. I think that we exist between two worlds, The stimuli from external source, and the mediation if our own interiority, in all its complexity. It seems likely to me that painting holds part of its fascination, as it is situated in the same space; a deep exploration of our existence between exterior and interior consciousness. An effort to externalise, using paint, it's systems and languages, an experience of the exterior, translated by consciousness.

Paint is ideally situated for such exploration. It is sensitive, flexible enough for descriptions which serve the intellect, the rational, but also profoundly sensual in its physical properties, it's evocation of sensual properties which defy the intellect, permitting description of the non verbal. Paint can mimic the perceived, and can in turn make perceptible the experienced. Painting is a kind of dreaming. Not in the surreal sense. Surrealism, for the most part, misses this point, focussing on the outlandish. No bad thing in itself, as different territory is opened up in painting. Disturbing visions of Ernst, visual picture play in Dali and Magritte. Perhaps de Chirico is closest to what I mean, and Lynch, where reality is either almost recognisable, or at times overlaid with a filter of inner vision, the strange, the uneasy. Film, as an immersive environment, works in the same way. Experience as the external mediated by consciousness. Painting, and film, can come closest to describing the space between worlds, the place we might most truly inhabit.

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A beautiful evening. Light, silence, gratitude. I watched Andrew Graham Dixon's story of the royal collection. Saw a number of paintings for the first time. Some absolute knockouts. Van Dyke (Cupid and psyche), Rubens, Titian, Raphael's st George. The more I learn about painting the more I'm astonished at the work. Can't help but feel these works should be on permanent public display, on terms such as those at the national gallery, much like the Leonardo drawings seen last week.

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Works in progress

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Nowhere to stand

I remember chatting with one of my tutors at art college, Mike McInnerny. He was trying to get his head around what I was interested in so that he could help me. My problem at the time was I didn't know. We shared an admiration of Ben Shahn, but that was about it. I could tell him what I didn't like, geometric abstraction and Kandinsky, who still gives me a headache, the source of which is beyond my understanding. My difficulty was that I could appreciate the brilliance in pretty much everything else. As a consumer, it makes me lucky, but as a would-be artist it's still something if a problem, although 25 intervening years have done much to show me who I am. I’ve always been drawn to the philosophy of the east, where the self is questioned, held as a garment to be discarded.Ram Dass describes encounters with self as a radio dial that can be moved, shifting identity through emphasis and focus - the star sign, the middle aged man, the academic, teacher, father,artist lover of outdoors, lover. The shifts of the dial are many, but there is nowhere to stand.

As a painter it is necessary to hold a position, at least if one is to pass through the doorway away from pottering around. To dig a deep narrow channel, instead of a broad, superficial one, in pursuit of quality, and self enlightenment. If exercises in relinquishing self point in a direction, it is that regardless of the fugitive nature of identity, one is tied to form. One is 'in school' and must 'take the curriculum'. To see that madness but play a part to perfection. Castaneda calls it 'controlled folly'. In some respects it suits a painter well, particularly today, in a culture which is de-centered, with the history of painting spread out like some buffet if combination. I don't regret the fading of traditions, and see the opening of possibilities as a positive. At the same time, I'm not sure that the question of what is art, and its boundaries, really belongs to painting anymore. It's a tired question, and painting has its own requirements. It is its own sub set and category in the great tradition loosely defined as art, and has its own internal laws, languages perimeters and judgements, which are by and for painters. I mean this as a total history - cave painting, children's painting, outsider art, renaissance, baroque, modernism, Chinese ink painting. One tradition, and heroes all of them. The question is, with all doors open, what to say and how best to say it. So where to stand? I enjoyed Desiderio's maxim - that you have to work out what it is in painting you can't live without. That's a work in progress. Drawing previously has been to some extent about resisting the fixed image. Drawing can lend itself to that as it is often largely a process of impermanence. Oil painting isn't. It is designed for longevity and for the depiction of surface, colour and light. It is significantly a physical process, thing of sensuality, touch, and objectness, despite its predisposition towards the mimetic. For me I think, this is where the magic lies, the physicality of paint, it's sensual presence as substance, and the space in which that substance becomes...everything we can see and understand.