Landscape with Rangers players

To start with I often just make marks with colour, rhythmically…this way…that way…
Trying to find relationships through instinct and improvisation. It is like messing around on a piano, playing scales, making shapes with your hands. No idea where I am going or even what I am looking for, but I’ll maybe know it when I see it.
A painter I think of a lot, and very much like is Per Kirkeby. I heard Kirkeby say that he often has figures in his paintings during their making, but he takes these figures out at the end of the painting process and so what remains is, by most definitions, an abstract painting, but he insists he couldn’t make them without these figures. In some ways I am the other way round. I need a battle of more purely abstract concerns before I introduce an image.

The dunes emerge as a space ( Gullane dunes ) and with that the suffering Rangers players that were made to run up and down them by their coach, a demanding Jock Wallace. This was inflicted on Hearts players also when Wallace was manager there, and brought to my attention by Amy, whose dad played for Hearts* in this era and endured this torture. But the maroon of Hearts has less appeal to me, its a colour I can’t wear, let alone have much on my palette, except for mixing.
To my mind conceptually it also has to be Rangers, that most ugly of football clubs, to undermine the romantic sensibility of the image.

Flicks of blue. Thinking of Kandinsky’s Cossacks.

The inside of a gatefold album cover: Jean Claude Vannier - L’enfant assassin des mouches.

* In an exchange of emails Amy’s dad tells me he has never been back to Gullane since.