That certainly applies to my long-awaited “art retreat”. The reasons for its oddity are interesting. I took with me for reading a book that my daughter had given me for my birthday recently, on the group of Canadian artists known as the “Group of Seven”. (I encountered them first during my year in Canada, in 1963-4.) Their work is truly beautiful especially in its use of colour. When I arrived in the cottage where I was staying I looked around the place and was intrigued to discover an excellent review of the life and work of Picasso. The down-side of these encounters was that, at first, they left me completely demoralised, and certain that I could never produce work that approached them in quality. It took me two days to realise that I do not live either in northern Ontario, or in Paris at the height of the great period in which modernism was beginning to come to the boil.
I did do a good deal of walking, however, along the rocky ridges overlooking the river Derwent, and the birch woods which clothe their slopes. After a while, managing to put aside inappropriate comparisons, I managed to begin seeing what was in front of me, namely, the birches coming into leaf and the hawthorns in full bloom. One never knows why these things happen, but I became completely preoccupied with the birches, and I have actually come back with a load of reference material and the germ of an idea for some work. I walked a great deal in the course of the four days, and I am in need, before anything else, of a good sleep. Next week, I hope, will show whether anything has precipitated from this experience which has the seeds off some art-work in it.