Abdullah Ibraihim is doing a concert tonight at the Barbican in London. He just said something beautiful on the radio : 

“Once you strike the note there’s nothing more that you can do about it.”     

  Such a helpful thought  when so much of this job is spent  trying to grapple with instransigent stuff that dries too quick,  goes too dark, moves too easily or just doesn’t look like what I thought I wanted. His compositions have such grace and heart, like so many of the pianist composers in Jazz. Breathe in and breathe out, it’s all improvisation. It’s good to get past what I think I want out of making this stuff and try to see what there actually is after a day at work. Sometimes there’s comfort in whatever  marks there are and you are so tired you can’t be arsed to scrape them off. 

So far today all I’ve got is some rather beautiful primed cotton duck, glowing gently as it dries in the studio.   

Finished the last carnival project late last night so now it looks like I might finally be on approaches for the Alaska job. Three days to get my seals in a circle.  Time for last minute decisions and planning (is there any other kind ?) : 

Support : fine cotton duck. I’m planning to pre stretch, prime and the roll up for the journey. This makes showing simpler than paper which needs frames and glass. Will experiment with getting a gesso like surface without making it so brittle it cracks when I roll it up.  

Media : Charcoal. No time for anything clever so back to cave man burnt sticks. I also want to use bodycolour so will put together a tight palette of acrylic based colours. Like the ones for the Orford Bomb Ballistics building panorama or the new Orford 360 panorama  I’ll use paper and sketchbooks for the rapid studies of weather and other changes. Have made some special sketchbooks that take letterbox format paper. Probably with watercolour.   

Off to watch paint dry now.  

Been thinking more about different ways of looking at a landscape, as part of the preparation for the Alaska job. The traditional concerns are about rendering volume and distance. Completely explained in the fabulous  Father Ted Series 2 Part 1 : Hell written by Arthur Mathews and Graham Linehan. Ted tries to explain the difference between a real cow and a toy one :

Ted : (Holding a toy cow in front of Dougal) ”Dougal, this cow is small. (points out of the window) Those ones are far away. Small … Far away.”             

 Genius. And everything you ever needed to know about linear perspective. Rendering distance by modulating tones (lighter = far away) and bending contours (converging on the horizon = far away). These are the obvious problems but not the most interesting ones. Let’s see if we can find drawn marks or descriptors for the moving, fluid and unstable bits of the landscape :

• Change (multiple alterations through time)
• Flow (soft through soft or soft around hard)
• Abrasion (hard into soft)

It’s lucky that change, flow and abrasion are also built into the uncertain process of drawing itself,  whether you want them to be or not. 

• Change by erasing and moving a mark but leaving the trace, pentimenti
• Flow by changes in direction and weighting of mark
• Abrasion by attacking the actual drawn surface, giving it a history

I’m rather uncomfortable with this kind of theoretical stuff, but I so often have no idea what I’m doing till I hear myself telling somebody about it. It’s also been partly provoked by a really interesting book about painting that I read and re read just now :  ”What painting is” by James Elkins. A lot of it confused me, which is no bad thing, but it did a wonderful job of trying to talk in the language of paint. I’m trying to ask similar questions here about drawing I suppose. Drawing is the most accurate and sensitive way of recording look-decisions. Often it’s too accurate when the looks aren’t careful and the drawing is going badly. The limitation is that these decisions can only be recorded a a sequence, basically because I can’t think and draw more than one thing at a time. I want to know if I can wire up the drawing process differently - wire it up in parallel instead of in series.  

Numbers can do that. Can a drawing ?   

I’ve got a rather scary commission coming up in four weeks time: to make a panorama of the Cook Inlet in Alaska, two and a half weeks to complete and show the work. 

My basic idea is to do another paper based panorama, with a lot of quick studies of dynamic components in the landscape like wind, light, cloud, tide, moon, snow/rain etc. But, while I love the working qualities of paper, charcoal and paint, work on paper is static and the landscape never is. This time I’d really like to make a drawing that tries to describe the changes,  the dynamic agents in the landscape itself. 

I have no idea how we are going to achieve this which is why I’m lucky to be collaborating with someone who works in Anchorage. He has a science background, but we seem to have the trick of listening to each other carefully, so our differences of viewpoint don’t seem to matter at all. His idea is that we make up a layered view across Fire Island which can eventually be web based and somehow related to live shots. One of his jobs was to develop ways of displaying complex underground geology that could only ever be measured indirectly. We both realised that these surfaces were just like a landscape drawing except I use eye/hand instead of a seismograph. His language is mathematics and mine definitely isn’t. The only maths that ever made sense to me were pictures and patterns (tesselations, platonic solids, magic squares).  Numbers have never had an abstract life for me and neither have words - I can only write this stuff if I believe I’m talking to somebody. My dear friend and collaborator can use mathematics as a speculative and descriptive tool that I can only understand by telling myself it’s “like drawing”. He’d call that that activity “visualising data”. 

So this commission will try to find out how much “like drawing” visualising data actually is. Time for some lists :

Drawing on paper : Good for simply and quickly recording subtle and emotional responses to the felt and the seen moment. Bad for accurate description of changes in observer and observed, unless you do an animation. 

Numerical arrays (values for light direction and intensity, wind speed and direction ) THese columns of figures are good, as all lists are, for recording change, for accurately spotting trends and cyclical changes. They are bad for getting any complete picture unless you are trained to read numbers. Any list of numbers, however accurate, struggles to convey a sense of place or moment, which is very bad if you are trying to visualise a landscape.  

In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora.

Now look what’s happened. I’ve started re reading the Metamorphoses of Ovid, translated by A D Melville.  I really wish I could read them in latin and wish even more that Richard Burton had recorded a talking book of them all so I could listen while I’m engraving.  

Isn’t Metamorphosis a spark idea ? It’s something I’ve been gripped by since I was a child and got me into my Changelings series. This series of engravings and paintings is a Dream Bestiary, based loosely on those 12th. century bestiaries where most of the creatures were made up. That and those wonderful theatrical spaces that Goya made in his Disparates and Capriccios .

Mutation, shape shifting, play acting. There is something very erotic about the friction between memory and anticipation. What I now have to do is work on the portable form that this work will take. Books, boxes pop ups and theatres .. watch this space. 

I listen to a lot of BBC Radio4. There was a recent In Our Time about about Greek Myths where somebody (either Nick Lowe, Senior Lecturer in Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London or Richard Buxton, Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Bristol) described a really  interesting difference between oral culture and print culture.

 One of the professors said ‘the identity of the author has worn away’ and as usual Magic Melvyn got me thinking. Oral culture is promiscuous, we just pass it on. There’s more pleasure and less ownership and it is so different from visual culture which is branded, curated and always has provenance. It’s like the difference between DNA and a love letter. The Greek myths may have started as somebody’s story but now they are everybody’s. This abrasive point of contact between ‘mine’ and ‘everybody’s’ is an interesting but uncomfortable place to work. For me it’s making work that doesn’t have too much of me so everybody else get bored, not too much of everything else so they get bored by the lack of an individual voice.  You can probably tell that I haven’t sorted this out yet. But for me this thing about human authorship is also the the interesting bit of the landscape.

That’s how I feel about landscape - I’m drawn to the hard residuals of human occupation, and have never been interested the prettiness of light and gardening. 

  This is a big drawing (over 3 metres long) of Orford Ness in Suffolk.  I’m only really interested in the hardness of landscape, that shows the human footprint, residue and wrack. Like myth and storytelling original purposes and authorships are wearing away.

For a city boy like me there is something unsettling about big spaces. East Anglia, which is where I now live and work, is open and windswept. My daughter said she liked my panoramas because she didn’t know where to look first. I feel the same way about being out in the open when I’m not in line of sight to Canary Wharf. Somehow that girl is always right on the money.

 This work connects with my long term collaborator Steve Mansfield-Devine. He’s working on a landscape photography project he’s calling called Modern Megaliths.  His work is also about 20th century residual stuff but facing the opposite way on the French coast. He is also interested in the letterbox format and says : “Using a vertical panoramic format tightly constrains our tendency to scan horizontally and creates tension by forcing us into an unusual and unnatural vertical scanning mode. Knowing that your attention has been directed in this way, you cannot avoid concluding that there is a significant association between the tower at the top of the image and the objects beneath it.

Here’s the link to the Panoramas bit of my portfolio.

 This all started with Radio 4 and the thought that a lot of these coastal defences are turning into Greek temples - erected to gods and assuaging anxieties that most people have long since forgotten. 

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I’m on approaches to a two person show next week in a really interesting artist run space called Peppermint SHED in Suffolk UK.

I’m really excited about this show, I committed early on to making new work specially for it (why don’t I keep my mouth shut?). It has turned out to be a lot of new painting, most of which is mostly ready.

I’m also showing new prints, hopefully in a new way. I’m getting tired of is putting my printmaking behind glass. Glass is too polite and too aloofing. It detaches the viewers - they window shop rather than really look. The process of making this feckin stuff is physical, messy, surprising, uncertain, tactile. Glass stops all that from getting to the viewer. It stops the work from carrying to them a record of a moment and a discovery. It just becomes a displayed product, a static object just like any other in the visual slurry we wade through every day. Working titles for this new work are : bookworks, boxworks, folders.

I’ll report back if you can’t make it to the show.

2008. Now. Then.

I feel like I’m really in a hurry. Time to simplify, focus. Momentum, direction. Work with portable tools. Concentrate on voice rather than grammar.

• Clear the undergrowth of technical experiments.
• Simple and portable. No prep and final work, just work.

Concentrate on voice rather than grammar.

• Clear the undergrowth of technical experiments.
• Parallel sources that can be combined and recombined : draw, paint, monoprint, relief print, relief mould.
• Common markmaking : Hard (ink line burin) and soft (brush charcoal stump) marks. Connect all media through common markmaking.
• What are the descriptors for difficult forms ? Recession ? Foreshortening ? Merging ? Emerging ? Describing symmetrical volumes. Use tone as a descriptor as well as line. Use the revealing language of light as well as the analysing language of line. Try to get light back from the photographers. Analysing darkling form without just relying on line. Light is a revelatory agent.