I’m having an unusual experience at the moment, working on a new picture. Normally I think that I tend to see painting as an additive process. The picture is built up through the successive addition of various elements. For some reason or another the work I’m doing at the moment doesn’t feel like that. It is as if the image is in there somewhere, and I am chipping away at the surface and gradually revealing the object concealed within. It is a very odd sensation, which makes painting resemble sculpture. The image is envisaged as existing somehow “in there”, and my task as an artist is to bring it to the surface, instead of depositing it on a surface. I have to say that it is a very weird experience.
Speaking of oddities of experience: I had a haircut today. This is only the second one I have managed since the lock-down began …. and very welcome it has been too. As I walked home I had a fantasy that in some future time we will have taken to dating events in relation to these peak experiences. “Do you remember? It was just after my second hair-cut.”