Loads of freelance work to grip the body and mind, mostly props and painting and some carnival work. The props are Stymphalian Birds, for a show in Chester about the labours of Hercules. They got that right, I made 8 of them.

 I especially enjoyed doing the paintings. What is it about easels and frames and galleries that throttles the pleasure of painting ?  There’s something playful but purposeful about painting for the theatre. It’s so rewarding because working towards a performance has to be more collaborative, less ego driven. The work ends up less polite and prissy than working for a gallery show.

 Strangely all this activity left room for my heart and guts to think at their own pace. Guts and heart are good at asking the why questions, the questions you tell yourself you haven’t the time to ask. To be honest I’ve felt dissatisfied with business as usual since I came back from Skye and Orkney. As my dear friend Bill Brody said :

“I’m tired of doing art that I’m supposed to be doing”. 

He heads for the backwoods whenever he needs to think. He’s just back from a two week canoe trip in Beaver Creek Alaska. He’s very good at using the rigour of proper travelling because he has the practical stuff sorted, and keeps working whatever happens. The first thing he does is absorb himself into the silence. This allows the questions to appear at their own pace, and then it’s just a matter of waiting for an answer. It’s been the opposite of the backwoods for me - I’ve been in the studio without a break for nearly two months - crowded, sweaty, dusty and anxious. I love all of it. I particularly love working on things people actually want.

 Somehow the pressure of other peoples projects and deadlines means that the deeper bits of me carry on at their own pace without distracting themselves with making ‘Art’.

Art. I really dislike that word. Here we all are, queueing up for the last dance of the hominids. How can making eyeball pleasers be a priority ? How can desperately trying to get some airtime from the chatterati be a sensible job ? The trouble is, I never really got myself to believe that ‘artist’ was a proper job, even though I really wanted to be one. When I was younger (small kids and big mortgage) people who said they were artists either had rich parents or were blokes who talked all the time, drank most if the time and saw their kids intermittently. Or they lied about it and were really teachers. Never felt I belonged there, however much I was drawn to the work.

So I’m liking this theatrical painting. Make the stuff I care about, work fast (it’s later than you think), stick it in front of an audience and don’t blink first. Don’t need to perform, just need to mean it. So now I’m working for a local festival, a bunch of pre Christmas shows (Brighton art fair and Old Fire Engine House gallery in Ely and Open Studios in October).

I’m going to push the colour lithographs, do some more scenic painting and mostly I’m going to follow the stuff that excites me.

Sunday hiking with Bill in Quirang NE Skye. Coast all churned and sliced, the track slipping away from a scarp that overhangs the sound of Sound of Raasay. Glimpsing Rona and Wester Ross on the mainland through the weather. Not much drawing but lots of looking and “Oy vey ! will you look at that”. Reassuring to see what a strong impression this place I love is making on Bill, who is used to 40 mile long glaciers and 20,000′ high mountains. There is something happening here, even thought we don’t quite know what it is yet.

Monday, proper hiking and painting with Bill and Susi along the S edge of Loch Brittle. Working on the cut edge of a waterfall, all roar and rumble with more fluidity than fixed things to look at. Similar feeling to a freight train roaring past when you are standing three feet away on the platform. Susi made a beautiful mark study of the big sweep in front of us and then, being a jeweller, went in for a close up study of a sedge clump. This was the first time I saw Bill working out in the open. He was perched on the edge of the biggest drop, pinging up and down and working on a horizontal panorama in rapid brush marks. He somehow has the capacity to claim the whole picture, whereas I chewed away at segments and had a lovely time working the charcoal into the paint and vice-versa.

Tuesday we visited Elgol, SE Skye, on the recommendation of my mate John Dyvig. Elgol is at the end of the road at 135517, overlooking Loch Scavaig. A wild SE severe gale with spindrift flashing over the breakwater, Soay Island looming in and out of the grey wall of cloud and spray. We could barely speak in the open but now have a plan to get a boat into Loch Coruisk as soon as the weather calms down.

Wednesday Last day with Shug and Susi, wisely spent visiting the Tallisker distillery.  Now all packed up and ready to set off tomorrow from on Elgol for up to a week camping around Loch Coruisk We are sailing on Misty Isle with Seumas macKinnon.

Thursday I’ve only just got time to post this before in an hour’s time, and will be off the grid for around a week, will post proper pictures of the place and the work when I get back.Here’s some really links I’ve picked up along this really wonderful journey :I was pointed at an interesting blog of artists who work with water, called Watermarks :We got a really friendly reception from Ian Chard in Broadford Books and Gallery. When Bill went in to buy a piece of plastic to repair his broken pallette.Got a lovely mail from Nigel and Kathy, a couple of kayakers I met in in Orkney. Working the tides and dodging the winds in that magical island.

Looks like Bill Brody has started something with his blog about foveal vision.It’s really got me thinking because it’s counter-intuitive.  Most of what we call looking actually takes place after we have looked.  

The brain joins together all of those quick glances, those foveal spot-scans into a composite idea of what is there. Forget rectangular frames and bits of paper -  our field of view is broadly circular. Forget trying to make a drawing from a single look or photograph. Also, because foveal sounds like a soya based meat substitute I’m going to call foveal looking spot vision and peripheral looking edge vision.

The edge is much more interesting than the spot. 

I dropped this whole confusing thing into a studio session at Colchester yesterday and the students came up with some really interesting work ! Teaching is truly amazing when you see ideas get up on their own legs because they’ve been invited in by a group of students. I asked them to do a life drawing where they only look with the edge of their eyes. The model moved across their field of view but their spot vision stayed in the same place. The drawings were wonderful. I only realised how difficult it was when I tried to do one of my own - I noted two spots on an easel a metre and a half from the model and marked them on the paper, then kept my spot vision only on them to both look and draw. It’s virtually impossible ! I had to keep wrestling my spot vision away from the model and even more difficult away from the drawing of the model when I looked at the paper. Also it was impossible to respect the rectangle of paper or board, which is why I started drawing on the floor. 

It’s quite good for teachers to be occasionally subjected to their own daft ideas.  

I like the idea of a third kind of looking.  I like the idea of thinking with the edges of our minds and finding treasure. So much more interesting than counting out the coins we already have. 

Peripheries have always drawn me so it’s inevitable I should start drawing them too. I’m sure that’s why I went to Alaska, why Bill and I are going to the Western Isles, and why I want to go to Orkney. Peripheries don’t have to be far away either, I am always moved by the subtle tipping point where my own human made world crumbles and rots back into it’s earthy source. There is also something so poignant about those myriad unhomely places in the corners of the city where we pass by but cannot rest. Places on the edge of human comfort. As a kid I got in to trouble for writing “This is the outside world. Enter at your own risk” on our side gate. Our back fence had hole in it so I could see the ‘allotments’ - little cultivated strips left over from the war where people grew their own food because the submarines stopped us importing it. Somebody out there kept pigs and we had a pig swill bucket outside the kitchen. One day big diggers and lorries turned up and built a strange square concrete place with no windows and a big fence. I found out later it was a Regional Seat of Government, where the selected few would sit out the nuclear winter. Scared the crap out of me even before I knew what it was. That must be where my thing about concrete started. Making this blog is really helping me at the moment because my studio is  full of building materials and I’m not getting any time to work in a sustained way. Scanning in bits from the sketchbook and thinking is a way of keeping in touch. 

Bill Brody said something really interesting about making a landscape painting. He described two kinds of looking : with the edges of our eyes (peripheral vision), and with the centre of our gaze, which is called foveal vision.

I had to look that up too. But it’s self evident to anybody who spends time looking or drawing. The centre of your gaze is sharp and log-jammed with detail while the edges are only interested in big differences of form or light or movement. Centre vision evolved for hunting, edge vision is for detecting predators. I like to use both when I am drawing, screwing up my eyes so my centre vision goes fuzzy. My friend Nigel said something wonderful about assessing a painting when you go into the studio in the morning .. “You sneak up on it and look at it out of the corner of your eye”. Bill Brody was talking about how painting lets you direct the viewer’s gaze by modulating descriptive detail, colour and tonality. This connects with the Italian word caminare, walking. You can be walked through a picture by colour cues - brown = foreground, through green to blue = distance. Can do this with tonality as well.

To me this is exactly what the drawn gesture is, it’s a visual invitation to pay attention. I have the most trouble with the opposite though, with flat areas of tone. They often end up as just that, flat, laying over and obscuring the bones of the drawing. I REALLY want to get back into the studio .. I just need to get all the builders stuff out first :-((