This afternoon I sat in the garden in the shade of a tree and spent some time trying to make sense of the vague shapes that were beginning to form in my head. Several days ago I started to have intimations of material that could possibly (just possibly) form the basis for a new painting project. It might have something to do with war and its impact on my identity and my life. On that occasion I grabbed an old notebook and began to jot down a few ideas. The past week has been too busy (particularly with preparing to send off via a courier the piece I sold) to think constructively about new pictures. Today I had time and leisure, however, and hoped I might take the idea forward.
I sat for about an hour, trying to group the sentences I had scribbled into coherent themes, and then starting to give visual representation to these. It is slow work, and the core images so far are rather dimly perceived. Some ideas that seem intellectually clear to me have virtually no visual content. On the other hand I recall some fairly sharp images, but they float free of any organising principle. The gestation of any large artistic project has always begun with this kind of blundering about, trying to distinguish between those ideas that unite a clear idea with some emotional force and a formal vehicle of some kind, and those that remain mere ghosts glimpsed in a mental fog.
I guess that the next stages might involve the collection of a rather random heap of reference material, linked to some time spent with a large sketch pad and some charcoal, doing whatever the artistic equivalent of “brainstorming” might be.
I do wonder whether a contributory component of my mental state might be the experience of last night. My step son has been making cider for some time, and has now begun to promote this seriously as a commercial project.* More recently, he and a friend have acquired a license to distill gin. Last night they held a promotional event in the nearby town of Shipley, and we went along. I would not have expected it to be my scene, but it was a surprisingly congenial affair. He makes presentable cider …. I tried both of the lines he makes. You will be relieved to hear that I left the gin for a later occasion. No! I don’t think that my current mental state has anything to do with the cider.
*Grumpy John’s Cider”