Is there any such thing as a “dead idea”?

Some time ago, during the Diamond Jubilee celebrations for the late Queen Elizabeth, I had an idea for a picture. This was to have taken the form of a pictorial response to the enormous and extravagant parade which took place in London, marking the occasion. I spent some time downloading from the TV a number of stills of the event, and began to work these up into a composition. I’m really not entirely sure why I abandoned the scheme, although I think that in part this had to do with an unwise choice of medium. Also, it did involve a very complex composition, and I recall that this wasn’t working out too well. Perhaps the death blow to the project was my dissatisfaction with the sense that the satyrical target of it had become the well-meaning people who took part in the event, and not the overblown and sentimental idea of monarchy which drove it. Whatever the reasons, I laid it aside, and assumed that it had gone the way of other might-have-been schemes.

To my surprise, watching TV in our bedroom in Rome the other day, quite out of the blue, the idea came back to me. The context would be different, and the political objectives of it would be different, but the pictorial core of the project was recognisable.

As yet I haven’t done anything to bring this to fruition, but working in the garden this afternoon I became convinced that it is worth further exploration. Watch this space! It would be a real departure from customary practice for me, as I cannot remember when I have ever painted a piece before with expressly political intentions. The creative juices, however, have begun to ooze, if not yet to flow.