Along with the late Freddy Mercury, I’ve reached a point at which I need to find a change of scenery. After the experience of the past few weeks, working up to an exhibition, there is inevitably a certain feeling of anti-climax. It isn’t the case that I have in any sense lost faith in the work I’ve been doing. Nevertheless, I really don’t think that I can take it any further at the moment. I need a new sense of artistic direction.
I do know one thing, and that is that I am not going to rush into anything. There are vague intimations of possible directions for work, lurking at the back of my mind. Even so, I think that it would be fatal to throw myself into something just for the sake of being busy. Next week my wife and I will be taking a brief holiday, up in the Yorkshire Dales, and the primary preoccupation for both of us will be, quite simply, restoration. Even art will be taking a back seat. I’m not sure that I will even take any art materials with me. I just want to be for a while. Between now and then I think that I ought to concentrate on “maintenance tasks” and allow “progress tasks” to take a back seat. I shall be taking a kind of artistic “retreat”.