A eulogy to a time, or times. Day trips to Millport.

It is based on Ritz cafe in Millport on the Isle of Cumbrae (though the floor is from Paolo’s, a chip shop in Glasgow). The Ritz cafe is one of those classic Scottish-Italian cafes that are found all over Scotland, tailored to meet certain appetites for sugar and fat.
For me though the painting was a meditation on time. It was a slow painting to make with large gaps of time in between. It came slowly and gently, unobtrusively.

I originally planned to exhibit it in June at my show with Modern Art in Mayfair. I liked the notion It would have been a stones throw from the other more well known Ritz, but it emerged at its own pace. It wouldn’t be hurried.

We have kept returning to Millport and always to the Ritz cafe. It never changes though we have. Our boys have grown into men. Some people we knew have disappeared. Hunterston nuclear power station across the bay and visible in the mirror is being decommissioned. Above and around it windmills have sprung up. New energy. The world is changing.

Figures and objects in the painting came and went too. In the end an empty - or emptied out- space. Presences and absences.
I thought of our Paul and good times.

And another Paul - Paul Klee. His wandering within a work, his famous “taking a line for a walk”, he begins in the middle and radiates outwards, like a living organism, or maybe at one side and travels to the other, the task of patterning and the natural organic human wobble that emerges, seemingly by another hand.

But some things seem more constant.
The Ritz remains...for now.
My lovers eyes are still blue