Following my recent visit to the Bradgate Country Park in Leicestershire, where I accumulated quite a stock of reference material, I am now committed to developing this as a series of paintings. It is wonderful to be so motivated again, and so confident that there is a resource here which will keep me creatively busty for some time. I have completed already two canvases and I’m well into a third. It is hard to tell for how long I will want to work this particular seam, but I have two further ideas in a fairly clear form, although whether or not I will find further inspiration it is not possible to say.
I know that this is not the way in which every artist works, but I have a history of committing myself to series of items shared these. The first of these was the Four Quartets project (inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem) and I have also completed the Presente! project, dealing with Italian experience during the Great War, theories of reflections on my encounter with a group of ancient hermitages in northern Spain, entitled Set Apart, and most recently my explorations of the “Green Man” image.* In addition to these larger projects I have also developed ideas in smaller sets of pictures on several occasions. I’m not sure how it has come about that I think in terms of multiple images like this, but it has just turned out that way.
Of course, I am far from being the only artist to work like this. I have some very illustrious forebears, beginning with Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel and going down to Grayson Perry’s The Vanity of Small Differences.** Thinking about this way of working, however, it struck me tonight that it has both advantages and disadvantages. It is nice to be able to develop an idea on a large scale, over a succession of connected images. The problem is, however, what you are supposed to do with these as collections. Who is going to buy work which is on this scale? Whereas I am happy with the idea that my current project could be sold off as individual pieces, a series such as Set Apart only really makes sense as a whole.
*All of these are represented by “galleries” elsewhere in this web-site. Do take a look.
**Of course I don’t see my work as being of comparable value to these. The comparison is only with the common form.