Thanks for that Scott. I’m really pleased that Grady’s excellent piece has gone to publication (after being delayed). Sorry you couldn’t read it. To tell the truth I haven’t yet (though I have read the draft copy). I got carried away looking at all the other things. There is some very clever painting, impressive, technically fine yet a fair bit of it did begin to feel just too OTT and Baroque. The slickness of it does make me feel that in every new piece that I do, I am learning to paint all over again and the triumphs and failures of this is seen in each painting. Isn’t this how it should be? Some years ago in England there was an exhibition called The Hard Won Image which focussed on British art. This ‘hard won image’ thing had been seen as a good and necessary thing but this was in the land which seemed to give birth to ‘the hard won image’. It is seen as a British thing, English even. It doesn’t exist in Europe and from what I have seen, in the US either (yet). Some commentators have more recently bemoaned the failings and follies of the English. Showing the struggles in the work being seen as an attempt to compensate for or excuse failure or even being a sort of protestant inverted snobbery. Many comments come from continental Europe but a sizeable proportion come from the English themselves. Ironically this in iself is a modern English phenomenon; embarrasment and self-depravation after years of confident Empire building. Guilt and constant apology is the new foundation of modern Britain. I’m almost on the verge of apologising for getting side-tracked too much!

I am wishing to spend a long time in the USA in the near future. Time or money or family prevent this. Sometimes it is all three things together. I have never been to the USA. For years I have actually had dreams of landing in the US and really excitedly, believing it, then I wake up…

Thanks for the offer to stay. It gives me the incentive to make the dream a reality.

There was, in American art academia, this belief that pieces of art should show the ‘process’, an idea that is akin to your British ‘hard won image’. What might be slightly different is that the steps of the process should all be evident, proof of the struggle. I guess I disagree with that, and find it leads to a bit of an artsy-fartsy effect. This idea always reminds me of seeing a tightrope walker as a kid when my parents took me to the Ringling Brothers circus in Sarasota. The woman was walking along, high up, when she suddenly slipped, and the crowd gasped, and then she regained her balance and continued on her way. Dad explained that she had done this on purpose to excite the crowd. Showing the process, the struggle, seems a little showy to me at times, especially when it is intentionally done that way and not left behind for reasons of speed or ‘finish’.
In your work I can see, if I go close, how it was made, and worked over, but there is no sense of it being artificially left a certain way to expose this. When I think of a Holbein or an Ingres, there is no evidence of the ‘struggle’, but there is a certain knowledge that what they do is extremely difficult. A Rembrandt often shows the process, but again it feels natural. And a Michelangelo or a Tiepolo makes it all look effortless…
So I guess we Americans have centuries of guilt and constant apology to look forward to!

Very interesting and pertinent comments, thanks. It is true what you say about nostalgia and that each era is just that; merely a phase. One get’s sucked into introspection. I often think about stores or businesses which cease trading after many, many decades, even centuries, and the sadness which accompanies this loss. Then I think about the time those businesses didn’t exist. The small business loses out because of the big business, but there willl come a time when this status will change again. I suppose, like so many, I am attracted to ruins (of any age).

Thanks Grady. I really appreciate your enthusiasm!

So many things you observe and comment upon tell the truth. Its a funny thing about the wildlife. It is there of course, in the flora and all that almost invisible stuff, the insects, the microscopic stuff, all those things which make up the underbelly of the ecology. Well, its implied. As for the bigger things, the birds, the rabbits, the foxes…well sometimes, to portray those things just seems too sentimental. I know they are there but Beatrix Potter (though her animals were better portrayed than most of today’s stuff) and years of Walt Disney (even he is far from the worst) have made it so that it is difficult to put animals into a landscape with the raw autonomy which they deserve. Courbet was quite good at it. I love to see animals in the wild, in the flesh. I don’t care for nature documentaries and I’m not interested in wildlife photography. It means nothing to me. Painted animals depends on how they are done and with what feeling. Good ones are by say Nicki Colbeck; there’s first hand experience and feeling there. The worst are those which humanise animals, or are directly photographic (why bother?). Its a challenge. I should rise up to it.

so many comunities and lives of people surounded old places and to that became there center . the factory,the corner store and the places where souls of places can still be felt. from the days when you didnt have to call anyone but knew where to meet