After a kipper at the Caledonian Club with my brilliant accountant I had a look at the memorial in Westminster Abbey which we have been altering slightly. It looks much better now. I gazed at it with no dismay and liked the ghostly frame as if of whispered words (which potent beings at the Abbey would have preferred dark and more assertive). Then along Victoria Street past Artillery Mansions where sixty years ago I visited my father in his then poky office, to Westminster Cathedral for a glimpse of the Cardinal Newman mosaic and the marble Gerontius panel as well as the black hole for which I should have already provided a design for St David. I work at it but as yet am not satisfied which is artistspeak for being stuck.


P.S. I still can't reconcile myself to the idea of paying to visit a church. Westminster Cathedral is free but the Abbey charges a lot. If you want to see the memorial piece without paying for an Abbey visit go through the arch at the west side of the building into Dean's Yard where another arch leads into the cloister itself. A man in a red gown will admit you if you say you are visiting the Conflict Memorial specifically. The memorial is on the right hand side about twenty yards along.

Creaking back into blogdom

Making the goldweight book has eaten up all writing time. Brain stopped play. Normal service will be now resumed... here an interim shot of studio with surprise railings, of which more anon.

My painting L: Epilogue

Beckett Again, 2009, oil on palettes, h28cms x w22cm(L) & 20cms(R)

I look at my painting and realise I have never seen it in unbiased light. Its western side (and only now I realise that what I have been calling West and East are, in terms of the wall that supports it, not merely cartographically but literally so aligned) receives from the window much more light than its eastern. The northernmost few inches happen to fall in the shadow of the window top. Electric light is differently biased with the South of the picture descending into gloom. I must get a proper look at it in the more general light of my other studio where I shall see it, and occasionally hit it (in alternate games at least), from the far end of the ping pong table.

It may serve also (in alternate games again) to distract my opponent, which will be useful in the return match against Dinos Chapman; after the decisive home win which marked our first encounter.

Meanwhile, looking to other tasks, I noticed last week two abandoned palettes in a corner, each in a different random mood and decided to make a diptych of them. What better text for them to share than another line from that sublime manufacturer of artists' mottoes, Samuel Beckett, to sum up the post magnum opus blues?

My painting XLIX

5.3.2009

The end of the affair. Finishing a major work, large by my standards and, by anybody's, long drawn out is an experience I can never get used to. Some kind of emptiness displaces the anticipated sense of fulfilment. Perhaps that is why I embrace serial projects that have no end, like 20 Sites n Years which will pass on to another to continue, or A Humument, a book that only death will shut. These are works I cheat of the dissatisfaction that their completion might bring.

With Quantum Poetics I set out to make a masterpiece and in the proper meaning of the work it is exactly that, albeit a flawed one. Back to Beckett and his indelible formula, Try again. Fail better, so apposite to the state of the artist. So this is a hill climbed, steeper perhaps than the one before yet whose top when reached merely reveals a higher hill beyond.

The painter doth protest too much? Maybe so; trying to be frank about the larger sensation I forget the small rewards that even now surprise me when I take down a panel to photograph and notice in some part of it a passage well imagined, finely wrought. The main frustration is having no idea what an object so familiar to me looks like through another's eyes. Once or twice I have caught sight of it in the mirror at the far end of the studio and see that it does have energy, microscopic and macroscopic, and the syncopated rhythm of a dance of signs. And it is a presence, w.a.f.

Most reassuring of all, on an adjacent wall, the panel that originally was its north by north west corner (and having started the picture's motion, was eventually replaced) now sits in the middle of a group of nine panels, hoping to seed a sequel. But that's another story.

My painting XLVIII

Like an advent calendar in reverse I have been closing off my picture panel by panel. On each I have made adjustments as called for by its rhythm. This has meant doubling back to paint a section once made dark, light again (and vice versa), teasing one kind of ornament out of another.

At the end of this process I expected the painting to declare itself finished, an end to endgame announced with both kings prone. But no, it signals 'error, error' like a flashing light telling me that some element impedes the dance. Thus I have to make a last major revision so that by the end of the month, as long ago predicted, Quantum Poetics will be both stilled and set in motion.

My painting XLVII

Detail at 30.1.2009

As I make small adjustments to each panel, altering its past, I begin to think more of the future of the picture as a whole; where it can be shown; where it might end up; who will see it; can it help to support future work; what are the impending practical problems of presentation; will it need varnishing, framing, and so on.

One plan to help it be seen and to earn some of its keep is to make a full size print version with Brad Faine at Coriander Studios with whom I have worked happily for many years. Brad says this can now be done, so we will make some tests.

Music Drawing, charcoal on paper, 1963, support: 559 x 762 mm

To delve further into the past, however, I have just visited the exhibition at Tate Britain Drawn from the Collection which includes a work of mine, one of two large charcoal drawings I made immediately on leaving art school in 1963 which represent the beginnings of a duel with abstraction and calligraphy. I remember the then director of the Tate, Norman Reid, coming to my studio with his curator Richard Morphet (those were the days) to view and reserve for the gallery an unfinished picture called Benches. Norman Reid saw the two drawings and chose (wrongly I thought at the time) the one now on view. The other I still have here (see My Painting 18.7.2008).

I was a bit apprehensive about coming across a work that I hadn't seen for forty years but was relieved to find it well presented and spaciously hung in good company and looking not at all bad.

My painting XLVI

As at 12.1.09

Only a handful of days into the second phase my picture begins to warn me that it will soon pull up the drawbridge and stave off any interference from its maker.

Having dealt with the two or three most challenging adjustments I was determined to make, I found myself looking at a painting that might be made prettier by further intervention but not stronger.

I must fight a tendency, often visible in my work (though not in my life) to tidy up. In this case the temptation is to over resolve the parts where the unfocussed turbulence of the underpainting remains. These are the areas, my painting tells me, that allow it to breathe.

Any talk about art in the making always sounds fairly mad and risks heading straight for Pseud's Corner. Still I maintain that, in silent conference with the painting, I have negotiated permission to tackle some remaining problems, rationing myself to one intervention per panel.

My painting XLV

As at 9.1.09

My first (and long looked forward to) task in the business of revision is to lead a full scale attack on areas that have been irritating me for months. I had left them as they were in order to move on, but they have continued to stare at me balefully whenever I look at the picture as a whole.

The leading offender is an egregious E which seemed to suggest the possibility of literal meaning, tempting the eye to construct other latent letter forms. This has undermined the general abstraction with an unwanted false premise.

To alter it requires a kind of double-knit as a third layer of paint and pattern changes light to dark and vice versa, working one ornament within the interstices of another.

My painting XLIV

As at 23.12.08

Here as promised to myself (on target, on time though decidedly not under budget), at the end of 2008, is the first complete working of my picture. It stands like a newspaper chess problem awaiting some crucial endgame strategy. Like the Good News President I have to be black as well as white and make all the moves. So my new year's resolution is resolution itself: farewell to faintheartedness; dithering adieu.

Happy New Year to my shadow readers and as Yogi Berra said, if you see a fork in the road ahead, take it. Watch this space; things may proceed quite quickly as of now.

My painting XLIII

As at 16.12.08

The moment approaches when the whole surface of the picture will be finally activated. As in that last adjustment of a camera's viewfinder the entire image will suddenly be in focus and only then will I really know, without the distraction of untreated areas, what I shall have to do by way of revision and adjustment. I should reach this point by Christmas. Excitement and anxiety are mounting in tandem.

My painting XLII

As at 5.12.2008

The scale of the bit-to-do-today, my giornato (see My painting XXVIII), has remained constant. At this stage of the picture, however, its size in proportion to the remaining area to be worked has increased enormously. At the outset, a year and a half ago, a section of fifteen or so square inches was little more than one four hundredth of the surface that lay ahead. Now, having (albeit deliberately) painted myself into a corner, each day's work is less than a tenth of what remains to be done. Soon it will be a fifth, then a half and then arrive at its own odd singularity. Which makes for nervous days. At that point the whole of the picture will be reopened and liable to revisits and revisions: the rules will change.

My painting XLI

As at end October 2008

Another stimulating month at Princeton. The Institute for Advanced Study was certainly the right place to see Dr Atomic in a live telecast from the Met. Much talk from those who knew Oppenheimer (notably Freeman Dyson) and fine film of the making of the atomic bomb (Wonders Are Many). I remembered the tiny triumph of finding authentic echoes of Hiroshima for A Postcard Century. Like most new operas Adams’s latest was a quarter of an hour too long but contained some brilliant episodes; and a masterpiece aria, Batter my Heart. Gerald Finlay was superb as Oppenheimer even though (according to the Institute Director Peter Goddard) he wore the wrong hat.

Mindful of all that, it was interesting for Tarik and myself to work with Jonathan Miller on a fragment of Heart of Darkness in an old New York synagogue on the Lower East Side.

In between bouts of writing about Akan Goldweights I stared at the print out of my painting pinned up on my office blackboard. In the last week of my stay I made some pencil marks on it, erased them, made some more... until I had an idea what to do next. Now back at the studio I have the painting itself to stare at. Things are somewhat promising and I’ve started tentatively attacking the last panel again.

Pencil over print out, late Nov 2008.

The day before I left Princeton I gave a short talk about making the Abbey Memorial. Part of the title refers to Baudelaire's marvelous remark that, whatever his circumstances 'the artist feels much like a prince travelling incognito'.

My painting XL

As at 31.10.2008

At art school we worked in silence. When eventually I graduated to independent studio life it occurred to me that listening to music would enhance the day: my LPs of Beethoven and Bartok string quartets could be just the thing. I was wrong. If I listened I stopped painting and if I painted I failed to listen, hearing just the first few familiar bars but only becoming aware of the piece again as the final cadence gave way to the hiss of needle on vinyl.

But priorities are priorities and I was always able to pay attention to the Test Match commentaries. Far from hindering concentration the spoken word seemed to take up the slack of a brain that would otherwise have inwardly burbled on about money and quotidien anxieties. When rain stopped play it was a double blow, although, as in winter, there was always BBC drama to look forward to after lunch.

Why not the mornings? Each day somehow seems a fresh embarkation with the chart to consult and a course to be plotted to negotiate once more the way out of dock and harbour. Towards the end of the morning (coincidentally when cricket also gets underway) the wordmind dwindles in its usefulness.

Changes in the wireless schedules drove the BBC plays to a less convenient time so I learned to record them for later consumption. Using cassettes brought me only a step away from the talking book, to which I am now addicted. Peckham library may be short on Trollope and Henry James but it is rich in literature I knew little about and I thank them for Elmore Leonard, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Lee Child, Dennis Lehane and those others who have sustained the doze-prone artist through long afternoons.

Working on this painting has clarified for me how much music is embedded in what I do and why its actual presence in the studio has never been a help. I have made drawing and paintings over the years that refer to music directly and even use the graphic devices of notation, staves, barlines, note-clusters etc. Sometimes as in Last Notes from Endenich these can arrive at a virtually playable score

Last Notes from Endenich, pastel h75cm x w150cm 1975.

and at others, using the same elements, as in Concerto Grosso, they evoke for me an imagined music that lies, for a technically limited composer, beyond my reach to realise.

Concerto Grosso, oil on canvas h91cms x w122cms 2002.

Quantum Poetics on the other hand, while it carries no such specific baggage, has deep musical roots that have spread strongly as it has progressed. All along it has had the feel of a symphonic structure with motifs and variations. Its soundscape has suggested a divided orchestra with the dark areas represented by cellos and lower wind instruments and the lighter background provided by the higher strings and woodwind. These, which never play together, are linked by a viola and horn continuo (with interjections sometimes harsh sometimes soft from the percussion) representing the intrusions and extrusions of the main calligraphy. I do not claim that this great orchestra strikes up whenever I start to paint but often it swims into the mind's ear. More than a few times I have sung along either in my head or out loud.

Now, just as I approach the final chimes of a cadence to mark its end, I am off again to watch the red and amber leaves fall on Einstein Drive at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. This will seem as if the conductor has suddenly put his baton down and quit the podium before the piece achieves its proper resolution. It is because, were he to turn the next page of the score he would find it blank. I hope to come back with the last few notes.

Erasures Exhibition

As at 17.10.2008.

To all my Canadian readers. If either of you finds yourself in Vancouver on Nov 1st you are invited to the opening of Erasures which features the whole of A Humument. See Events for details.

My painting XXXIX

Advances on the Western front of my painting have been slowed by diversionary manoeuvres in the studio as I grapple with the last stages of preparing the memorial for Westminster Abbey. As mentioned previously we no longer speak of war. Hence this Conflict Memorial will be unveiled, with much fanfare and bemedalled dignitaries in full uniform, by a royal personage on the 29th October.

After much sieving and grinding with pestle and mortar I have my pigment ready, a mixture of earth from the world's battlefields. It is tricky to paint on round sectioned wire with its four dimensions, back, front, sides and the bit-out-of-sight-one-always-seems-to-miss.

Meanwhile at the Abbey itself, locked in a little worker's lean-to, Phil Surey is chipping away at the cloister wall to carve the lettering that frames the metal centrepiece.

It is uneasily strange to be celebrating warfare (I have not yet learned to say conflictfare) but the artistic problems remain the same; of probity in design, truth to materials and the combination of these with propriety to the subject, to present a unity.

Asked to make a statement describing the work for the upcoming occasion I tried to imagine what would make sense for the bereaved (and the comrades and friends) of the fallen, for whom the memorial should carry most meaning.

This memorial takes the form of a text (adapted from that provided by the Armed Services Memorial committee) worked in welded steel so that the letters of which it is made support and strengthen each other in free space. With this structural interdependence and the presence of steel, the generic material of ordnance, a military metaphor is tacitly present. This is symbolically reinforced by the overall covering given to the metal which is made up from earth gathered world-wide (with the assistance of travelling friends) from various sites of conflict. These date from 1066 (Battle itself) via Agincourt, the Somme and onwards to the present day. Fifteen such earth samples were mixed and ground together to make a pigment bound in colourless acrylic resin. Thus, in an echo of Rupert Brooke's famous poem, "some corner(s) of a foreign field" are brought to an appropriate place to indicate the long ancestry of national courage. The not unexpected resemblance in colour and granular texture to rust could be thought quietly to voice the artist's hope of an ultimate peace. Framing the metal sculpture and beginning similarly with the all important word 'remember' is the motto of the Armed Services Memorial Appeal carved into the fabric of the Abbey itself, a stone that is the same as that used throughout the world by the War Graves Commission. The carving is made as deep as is practicable to catch the maximum amount of defining shadow.

The services and their dead are memorialised in bonded steel, camouflaged in the earth of battle, with a surrounding call to remembrance marked in sanctified stone.

I am of course invited to the ceremony though, looking at the embossed card I am not sure what, for an artist, 'full dress uniform without sword' might be.

My painting XXXVIII

As at 1.10.08

An encouraging thing about the painting is that, for all its pleas for revision, it does begin to benefit from its barmy method of execution.

As I had hoped it really offers two distinct experiences for anyone looking at it. Moreover these almost contradictory perceptions cannot quite be had simultaneously. Thus it protects itself from at-a-glance appraisal by the casual spectator (or lazy critic).

From any distance it reads as a relatively simple image of large calligraphic shapes floating in a variegated ether of lighter colour. Close up however it presents a continuum. Both light and dark areas are inhabited by ornament on a scale that keeps itself more or less a secret from even a few feet away.

A crucial part of the game (and every work must have the combative playfulness of a game) has been, from early on, to explore what Owen Jones described in the title of his unwieldy and wonderful Victorian tome The Grammar of Ornament. I have always regarded ornament as a high art - as distinct from decoration which is added to something rather than being the matter from which it is made.

Ornament often goes hand in intricate hand with script both in the great illuminated pages of Christian illumination and the masterpieces of Arabic art which respond to the restrictive anti-representational challenge of Islam.

One of my art school tutors said of some work I was doing that it was 'just like knitting'. He meant this to be caustically damning but, as time went by, I realised that what is originally seen as a fault in one's work can be its particularity; something that should be intensified rather than adandoned. So here I am, fifty years later, knitting again and with unflagging enthusiasm for the variations that can be performed on the themes of net and maze, interlace, foliation and meander. A thousand streams of influence come into play in this abstract vocabulary.

One such I am daily reminded of at the moment as I prepare my long delayed book (promised two years ago to Hansjörg Mayer) on Akan goldweights of which I have an embarrassingly large collection. These miniature bronzes, some figurative but most abstract, were used by the Asante (Ashanti) for weighing the gold dust that was their currency for many centuries. They exhibit a rich repertoire of ornamental strategies as in this sample group of the miniature boxes (cast via the lost wax process) for carrying an individual's tiny packages of gold.

My painting XXXVII

As at 23.9.08

Approaching endgame on the painting. Nervous times. There is always the fear of the image merely falling off the eastward edge it has been surging towards so slowly and for so long. The last elements have to conspire not only to sustain the momentum but to make sure the viewing eye is persuaded to travel back into the choreography of signs.

The analogy with ballet is not inappropriate: the problem on the theatre's dancing stage is to perpetuate the action: the corps de ballet has to command the whole territory. Its larger actions head towards the wings with strategies for return.

Stage, force field, battleground, microscopic slide, astronomical image, book-page, monumental inscription, diagram, weather system, planetary surface, map, musical score... all these and other ways of imagining my picture in its boundaries occur to me. Most constant is the dialogue between the microscopic and telescopic; that I am visually inhabiting either a minute event in the subatomic world or a huge one on the gigantic slow cinema screen of the cosmos. The other analogy most frequently invoked is, as here, the dance.

I once saw the dance of life and death, briefly and by accident. Opening the wrong door in an apartment block in Havana I chanced upon a young couple in a completely bare room dancing the tango to a quiet gramophone. They did not notice my entry and I watched the grey clad figures seeming to flit through each other, merging as they parted, separating as they drew together; all noiselessly with unhurried speed. After a few minutes I quietly shut the door on that entrancement but have been haunted by their magic motion ever since.

My painting XXXVI

As at 9.9.08

My friend David S, who is trying to have his unofficial portrait painted, occasionally looks over at my picture. Once, glancing at it while sitting, he asked "What happens if you make a mistake?" The only answer is the standard philosopher's escape clause, "It depends what you mean by 'mistake' ".

Since the painting is an improvisation following neither drawing or (as in a portrait) objective event, mistakes are difficult to define.

On both the level of detail and of the larger design every mark compensates for the one before, nudging the balance this way and that, as instinct leads me. Each mark is in a sense a mistake that has to be corrected by the next. This, in turn, will be corrected by its successor to restore the equipoise of the part and the whole. Like tightrope-walking it is an endless sequence of adjustments (I recommend the film Man on Wire for those who want to see art in its final form and purest beauty of madness and risk.)

The whole painting is in one sense made of mistakes. One is reassured by looking at the Michelangelo crucifixion drawings done at the end of his life, when he faced the fact that outlines do not occur in nature. These little epics are battlegrounds of indecision in which the uncertainty principle visits art before it finds a home in science. They are compounds of truthful error that quiver before the eye.

Two other possible questions suggest themselves, one too metaphysical and the other too cruel to contemplate:-

What if the picture makes a mistake?

and...

What if the painting is itself a mistake?

Yet David S is a part-time jazz trumpeter and is therefore aware that there are no mistakes in jazz - if one sounds a false or split note one immediately repeats it to show that it was deliberate. In painting as in jazz there is both need and room for creative bluff.

My painting XXXV

As at 27.8.08

This coming week I am to meet a postulator... a new word to me, whose meaning I should not easily have guessed. It is the title of one who states the premises and investigates the grounds on which some already venerated figure might make the leap through blessedness to sainthood. In the present case it is Father Paul Chavasse of the Birmingham Oratory who is in charge of the soon to be expected (and not uncontroversial) elevation of John Henry Newman. Fr Chavasse will give the homily at the Mass which precedes the public blessing of my mosaic of Cardinal Newman. The announcement of the ritual does not mention the name of the artist. Perhaps this is a secondary postulation regarding the work itself as having, like certain of the ancient ikons of St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, miraculously come into being and therefore to be designated as 'not by human hand...'

However I am asked to be there, a shadowy presence at a bells and smells occasion much looked forward to. All readers welcome (See events).

Study for mosaic of Cardinal Newman, 2007.

Quite early on in the evolution of my painting, at the point where I decided to expand from the panel that seeded it early last summer (see blog July '07), it became itself an act of postulation. In short, not to be bashful, I postulated a masterpiece, albeit a flawed one by this all too human hand.

Masterpiece is a word that hardly dare speak its claim. It is the pcitorial equivalent of sainthood, alhtough it originally signified a work which proved to the guild of St Luke that one had graduated from apprentice to full membership of the profession.

Now as I near the eastern edge of my painting I see the gap between postulation and confirmation. Decisions have become more significant. The picture has acquired so much identity that any move that does not comply with its implicit rules and constraints, or that shows a misprision of its rhythm and dance, will break what spell it has. I now spend more time staring at the picture than actually painting it. Like John Henry Newman it needs a miracle or two.

My painting XXXIV

Painting at 11.8.08

My new best friend is Vandyke Brown. Rummaging in my paint cupboard amongst tubes with labels lost or obliterated, some with corroding metal caps and others containing esoteric colours briefly flirted with (including one dark orange bought in Adelaide twenty five years ago marked Australian Flesh Hue) I came across an almost unsqueezed tube of Roberson's Van Dijk Brown.

I spread some out. It covered well, as we say in the trade, and mixed generously with other colours adding rich darkness without smothering their identity. Here was the very gravy of art, the deep baritone Bisto of pigments I had always lacked. Thus it makes a late entry into the painting and an all too late addition to my compost heap of terminal greys.

Colour prejudice is rife amongst artists and old habits of mind are hard to change. The colours I favour still echo those nine or ten in the Reeves First Oil Painting Set, a Christmas surprise from my mother, lavish for our circumstances, which had me rushing up to my room to set out palette and palette knife, turps and linseed oil, and the small canvas on the easel that came with the kit: only a beret and a smock away from being a real artist.

Within hours I thought I had been the first to discover that burnt umber mixed with ultramarine provided a very passable black. Ever since, until now, I have been faithful to the umbers, raw and burnt, thinking I would need no other brown.

The pleasure of an affair with a new colour has masked to some extent current hesitations and difficulties I am having with the painting, of which more anon.