I'll go on (continued)

Quantum Poetics, July 2010, Oil on panel.

Like those stages of the World Cup in which England feebly participated my painting Quantum Poetics has turned into a game of two halves. What, in a recent issue of Turps, claimed to be the almost finished thing ended up vague and veiled and somehow incomplete. It called for a complete revision. I added, by way of injury time, a further section of panels to its right wing painted in a different (major rather than minor) key and hung the whole work in the ping pong room of my other studio, where I could not escape its gaze.

The new section declared even more emphatically what was wrong so I took half the painting back to the Talfourd Road studio and set about revising it. It thus became a game of two studios. Now at last I have reworked this part and have reached the scary moment of bringing it back to join the unreworked half. The complete picture looks now like one of those telling illustrations of an old master that has only been partly cleaned; as if these new colours and somewhat revised drawing were what had been hidden underneath all the time. The whistle has not yet blown. I’ll go on.

Beckett Again, 2010, oil on palette.

Also revised as a game of two sides rather than two objects is the relevant Beckett piece. Now this splits the quotation to either side of a single palette. This could be mounted to face me entering and leaving the studio, showing whichever part of the quotation would be appropriate to the beginning or end of the day's work. I think I favour facing I’ll go on in the morning and I can’t go on in the evening. That's how it sometimes feels.

Beckett Again (verso), 2010, oil on palette.

[See it at Flowers, New York in my exhibition which opens on October 8th. Readers of this are invited to the private view on the 7th].

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?