pigment, collage and gum arabic on hardback book cover
25.2 x 18.8 cm
9 7/8 x 7 3/8 in
From Chambers Dictionary “Messages - things bought on an errand; shopping, especially food (Scottish-Irish usage)” Ingredients for cooking: Cumberland sausage, various squashes, haggis, figs, mince round, pear, Tunnock’s tea cake,...
“Messages - things bought on an errand; shopping, especially food (Scottish-Irish usage)”
Ingredients for cooking: Cumberland sausage, various squashes, haggis, figs, mince round, pear, Tunnock’s tea cake, chicken drumstick, beef tenderloin, French sausage.
Ingredients for painting: Gum arabic, Mars yellow, Naples yellow, buff titanium, cadmium yellow orange, nickel yellow, yellow ochre, red ochre, Chinese vermillion substitute, Venetian red, cadmium red, raw sienna, burnt sienna, chromium oxide green.
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I listened to the audiobook ‘this is not my memoir’ by legendary theatre director, Andre Gregory.
It is an adjunct, and expansion on the autobiographical film My Dinner with Andre, a film that has been so important to me over the years, one I have returned to again and again. A film that is resolutely un-cinematic, that is fixed to one situation, an intimate conversation between two friends in a restaurant. The camera goes nowhere but the conversation takes us imaginatively to Tibet, the Sahara Desert, huge forests in Poland and to Findhorn in the North of Scotland. We travel.
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November. Our least favourite month for lots of reasons, the biggest being the death of Paul five years ago. Paul, where did you go? The week he died Trump was elected, dark became darker, days became shorter, limping towards mid-winter. The urge to hibernate was strong. Wake us up when all this is over. A line from John’s film kept coming to me - “one day this will be a long time ago”. I couldn’t wait for it to be well in the past and now it is. The anniversary of Paul’s death passed. I thought about him, we talked about him, but I didn’t cry, the ache has dulled. Trump’s gone and things are a tiny bit more hopeful for the world. And November also has Joseph’s birthday, that wonderful gift that keeps on giving. Things are not so bad really. The pleasure of small things.
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At the back of the house I look onto an old folks home and can see into the rooms of people, sat all day watching telly, existing barely. Who am I to say? Their inner lives will be packed full of incident and feeling, an archive to choose from. Thinking of my mum in the home, her sitting sifting through a cluttered confusing menu of memories.
Will I go willingly? Maybe. As long as I get to paint.
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Music played - Leonard Cohen, Erik Satie, Superwolves, Simon and Garfunkel, Nick Drake, Harry Nilsson, Jude’s new song. _________
Ten recent paintings:
Winter vegetables ( to Robert Bell Cranston); watching the box; Wept for a day gone by; If you see something that doesn’t look right (after Hammershoi); snow globe; On the corner ( the way Jude stood); Keramic ( an everyday intrusion of someone I didn’t like); Messages; Landing; Without you
Ten recent paintings all made with pigment and gum arabic. These paintings have something to do with being inside, indoors all this time. Not just in the period of making but the time before, this period of time since March 2020, the time of covid and lockdowns. Still lifes, interiors, views from the window.
The focus has been very narrow and the aim small.
I’ve felt a bit ill, not very ill but slightly ill. I haven’t had covid but Lorna has. I don’t feel strong. I feel weak. I cry easily. I feel like making slight gestures in my paintings, a breath on a window pane, steam from the kettle, a spiders web ( which are actually very tough really, relatively, feats of engineering.) When I walk to the shops for milk and bread ( for “messages” as they say in Scotland) I feel dizzy. I wonder if it’s because of the sudden change of space, that my horizon opens up and seems overwhelmingly big, a world without walls. I hurry back indoors. To the security of walls, interior space. I feel like making work that is hardly there at all, something gentle like my mums home-baking. I think about a dark brown apricot cake she made and her meringues, chewy perfect off-white meringues, my mum’s magical alchemy. I feel close to my long dead parents just now. I miss them but I’m glad they missed all this.
I feel slightly alienated from the world at the moment actually, from its concerns. These paintings are saying nothing of any significance and I’m not even sure what, if anything, they might communicate to anyone else, other than relating something about the awareness - the ‘nowness of now’ as Dennis Potter called it - of being in a specific time and space. You ( reader, viewer) are in your space, and each of us are locked into something, our situation and feelings. Together in alone-ness.
I am painting like an old lady just now. I am thinking of Vanessa Bell, Gwen John maybe even Agnes Martin. Artists that retreated and worked secretively, quietly. I feel I’ve retreated just now. I Can’t face the studio. The building where the studios are is the HQ for New York Times during COP 26 and so the security is tight, we have to get searched and show a pass we’ve been issued with. Lorna has been going and comes back a bit annoyed that she has to explain who she is and what she’s doing with a bag full of turps bottles. I can’t be bothered explaining so am staying in the house…’ working from home’, which is strange. In between painting I make soup and stews and do laundry. The paintings are being made accumulatively, little marks here and there, building to something. I feel like I am on an artists residency, lots of my stuff, materials and research information, is not around me. I feel limited in a useful way, I am looking much more at what is around, out the window and in the flat, under my nose, exploring.
These paintings have nothing to say and they are saying it.
A plane circles in the sky all day over Partick and Finnieston looking for suspicious activity and it is said that above that plane, high above the clouds, is another plane hardly visible also circling, watching the watcher. Air of paranoia. The radio announces that the threat of a likely terrorist attack has been moved from substantial to severe. More incentive to stay in.