Working on paper today. This is small: 15cm x19cm. I might try something similar on a larger scale tomorrow.

I just happened to have another small piece of paper the same size…

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I've got a little way to go in my efforts to prise myself away from making pictures. Or perhaps it doesn't matter that much in the end. The hard thing is getting started, and then the next hard thing is when you stop – that's when the idea of whether this constitutes a ‘picture' or is just a mess emerges. At that point (which is where I am with the painting below, which I've been working on today), the best thing is to try not to assess it in any way. The decision whether to continue can be made without judgement, I think. I hope.

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I am thinking again about the idea of committing myself to doing something everyday, almost as a routine. However I don't want to try creating a new “picture” on each occasion. In fact I'm moving away from starting anything with the direct intention of creating pictures. It's almost as if I don't have the right to this activity. As if the genesis of picturehood is something which occurs outside of my direct control. I can engage in activities that may result in pictures but since the essence of a picture is something that exists in a space midway between the creator and the recipient, I can never control the transition from amorphous mess to meaningful image. Any picture that emerges is as much your creation as mine.

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Timber for five new stretchers, all cut up yesterday and ready for assembly. A declaration of intent.

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I was up in Sydney last week for Watters Gallery's 50th anniversary. It was a wonderful event and confirmed everything that is unique about the place and its people.

I had some good conversations about painting and what it means currently for me. One such conversation concerned the issue of structure and mess. I am quite interested in mess at the moment. I realise that my input into that conversation was rather particularly effected by my currently evolving ideas on this. I mentioned how the painting I'm working on reminds me of vertical gardens.

I also think about the way that gardens evolve through the execution of natural laws governing the growth of plants – and it is fascinating to observe how two plants set off across the garden and merge together, without any need for encouragement or intervention. I suppose that this is an aspect of how Darwin considered the development of a woodland bank which he wrote about in the last pages of the Origin of the Species.

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

He was particularly concerned with the dominance of one species over another but when you look at what happens at the conjunction of one plant and another, this is not immediately apparent. The merging of the plants mimics the merging of areas of paint on the canvas but it is difficult to reproduce the sorts of rules (natural laws) that will determine the kind of merging that will happen. Once again, self-consciousness, and the rational mind, tend to get in the way.

In the final year of my BA at St Martins in London, I became rather obsessed with the junctions between areas of paint in a very different way.

In that case I was wrestling with the line between two stained areas of (lightly sized) canvas, and how to make that line disappear as much as possible to maximise the effect the contrast between the painted areas. The structure of the painting itself was determined, like Darwins world, from the strict execution of rules set out before the painting was started. This produces some eccentric patterns which were never part of the plan. Taken further, this attitude to painting could represent a core that allows a lot of ‘natural' variation to occur, rather in the way that chaos theory can demonstrate.

It is interesting to think about how introducing further rules of engagement in painting, as we tend to do all the time in practice, undermines the simple extrapolation of rules in this process. When I paint, there are so many elements and variables involved that its hard to see fundamental rules at work. But I think that they ARE there – and can be seen in action on occasions. Perhaps the only relevance of this line of thinking is that it makes me keener to allow whatever seems to want to happen in a painting to occur. I need some kind of discipline to stop myself from imposing rules and ideas that seem to have worked in the past in order to let a new kind of structure in. Will it be an ‘amorphous mess'? we shall see.

When I try to picture an amorphous mess, I usually find myself thinking of the ‘primordial soup' which was the precursor to life on our planet. That all our varied forms of life emerged from this should tell us something, even if we are maybe not prepared to wait for a few million years for it to happen. We are SO impatient!

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This painting is progressing very slowly but I'm rather enjoying it. It has certainly changed a lot since I started. Here is the latest image together with how it was some months ago (the earlier version is on top)

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I've been spending some time in the garden

and I'm seeing more and more relationships between the way that plants grow and occupy space, and my painting. The painting I'm working on right now (which has changed significantly since I was LAST working on it) reminds me of vertical gardens I saw in Paris. At least parts of it do. Obviously, the painting is bluer, perhaps suggesting a seascape but what interests me is the way the different plant areas interact and the flatness of the perspective.

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These really are drawings, even if there's some paint involved.

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Looking for ways to expand on the drawing which forms the basis of my paintings. Though I am quite enjoying the softness of the recent paintings, I am also drawn(!) towards a certain surreal quality that comes naturally when the drawing is more arbitrary and confrontational. There is nothing more arbitrary than collage, and I am looking at how I have created drawings in the past using digital collage techniques. Its so long ago that I did this, that I've got to learn it all over again! Here is the first attempt.

If it looks a little edgy and noir, its probably because its based on stills from Polanski's Repulsion (but you guessed that already, didn't you?)

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Today this painting is getting a bit more substance to it. Still a fairly long way to go yet.

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Started yesterday (Monday 25th August)

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This is the video I made recently with Jamie Robson (my nephew) of Magic Panda.

Life is Elsewhere (Roi Koch mix) with video by Rod McRae

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Taking a while, but I now have eight years of shows under Exhibitions. Click on any thumbnail of a show for gallery view (includes titles – later I'll add the other details)

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I'm trying out transferring my website to WordPress, just adding it into this blog as extra pages. The pages will show as links at the top of the page. The first such page is Exhibitions, where I will be putting all the paintings from all the shows over the last 29 years. So far, however, only the last show is there! lots of work to do (but it is MUCH easier than editing the website in pure HTML).

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I decided to leave 365momentsinanymedium. I was beginning to find it intrusive having to produce a new complete work every day. Its not that the site or anyone else insisted on this regular output, but it was a personal commitment that I realised was becoming counter productive. I desperately need to work more on each piece than I can do in 24 hours. It has stimulated me into starting back into painting, but now its time to return to my own centre where I can paint long and hard on each work, which gives me such a wonderful opportunity to work out what it is about, and where I am going, as I go along.

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20140410 clip4: Another small animation (on Vimeo)

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While I'm trying to keep up with the implied committment of the 365momentsinanymedium to create something new every day, I'm not quite keeping up with it. Its good to have the incentive there – knowing that when I DO create something, there is somewhere other than a pile on my desk to put it, and that someone else might actually SEE it.

However, I'm keen to get down to something more substantial. At THIS moment in time, that is looking like it might be on the video side of things. I'm actually looking at collaborating with a musician (who happens to be my nephew) on putting some of the animations I have already done together with his electronic tracks. Having listened more deeply to his music, I think its quite an appropriate match. I'm also keen to do more, both on these videos (there are two that I'm thinking of – one from the year 2000 and one from a couple of years ago) and also on new pieces. The more I look at this older work, the more I want to do something new.

I'll post something on here as soon as its finished (whenever that may be!).

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365momentsinanymedium is doing me some good! its quite quick to do these drawings, and extremely easy to upload them since I don't need to do any photographing, scanning etc. There is plenty of scope here for development…

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At last – a little space from plastering walls and sanding floors! I am starting to get back into the world of painting again. One thing that has stimulated me has been reestablishing some connections with artists I knew way back in London in the seventies – fellow students at St Martins. One of them, Gail Sagman, has set up a website called “365moments in any medium”

(ed. not available any longer!)

which I've joined. Its still small, though growing, and I'm using it to get myself back into the discipline of producing work regularly again. I'm not exactly clear whether there is an assumed committment to produce something every day (365 days a year), but – hey, its not a bad idea! OK, so some work produced in that kind of way might be trivial, but at least it gets the process kick-started.

Now I've got to really think…. and think fast (if I'm to get into this routine) what the work is going to be about.

At the same time, and conjointly, I'm going to write some more on my website, in the ‘Story' section –

NOTE! I have transferred the Story to this website (see menu above).

which has been languishing for a while now. I have just added some pages I wrote recently in there but in order to get it up to date, I have to start analysing the last show at Watters in Sept/Oct 2013. That is a good place to get back on the road to painting…

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This is actually an older animation, made completely in Cinelerra, using masks in the compositor.
I'm working on the Blender angle, but don't have anything I really want to put up here yet. I keep being distracted by all the cool (and difficult!) aspects of Blender, such as applying images to objects. I'm a complete beginner, and there's quite a way to go. However, I've got ideas….

(ed. this animation is superceded by the one on this page above, which I made with my nephew Jamie Robson - see entry for 23/08/14)

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This renovation business takes forever! But I am starting to think about other kinds of creativity again. Specifically, I'm looking at animation, using Cinelerra and Blender, which is pretty exciting. Haven't done any 3D work for many years (not since I was a student, for a short while, in multimedia at RMIT around 2000). I will put some of my first – very tenuous – experimental clips up here later today.

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The show is well and truly over. Time to have a break, do some more renovation of the house, and eventually, to reflect on the work in the exhibition and decide where to go next. The momentum is temporarily lost – need some time to work on it!

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