Well, I would like to think so. After a long period of time during which I have not been able to produce anything of interest, suddenly today I have started to work again. I came back from my “art retreat” in Derbyshire with some reference material, but with only a very vague idea about how this might be developed. Oddly, the stimulus which seems to have got things moving is only marginally related to a specific image. It has to do, in fact, with the support on which an image might be painted. I have in my cellar a collection of old paintings and picture frames which might well come in handy one day. One of the images I recorded on my Derbyshire trip was of an old, dead tree. I was far from clear about what I might do with it, but it stood in an interesting relationship to its surroundings. The trouble with this idea is that it presupposes a very tall and narrow support. For some reason or another into my head came a recollection of a piece I had done many years ago, and even went so far as to frame it, but I can’t recall ever exhibiting it. The shape of this is ideally suited to the new idea. So, I rescued it from the cellar, and extracted the canvas from the frame.
This now stands on my easel; and during the afternoon I began to play around with it, wondering what would happen if I used it as a kind of “palimpsest”, with a new image permitted to develop over the old one, without obliterating completely the original. I was brought up short by my wife coming into the studio, and exclaiming how much she liked what I was doing, even though it was far from clear exactly what was going on there. It does seem that as a method I am on the right lines, despite the fact that there is, as yet, no clear destination towards which I might move things. What a curious situation! I am really quite interested to see how things develop, particularly as it is beginning to feel that the whole process is not exactly under my control. Watch this space!