I’ve evidently been looking at Christian art too much lately, because this reminds me of a Renaissance painting, possibly of the Assumption of Mary, or maybe some obscure saint experiencing an ecstatic conversion.

To be clear, it is actually some detritus lurking just beneath the surface of filthy, man-made lake. 

My studio just now. 

Except in real life there are too many colours and it is visually noisy, awfully so. Must fix it I will fix it. Fix. It. 

Another work in progress.

I’ve got seven…eight? paintings on the go just now and I don’t know what I’m doing with any of them. I’ve been trying to take a more instinctive approach and just respond intuitively to accidents and colours and textures but even saying that makes me gag a little because it sounds both indefensibly frivolous and revoltingly self-indulgent. My art education instilled in me the idea that painting is a Serious Business. I still feel like I have to justify every decision I make, even if only to myself. If anyone actually called me out on any of my aesthetic choices or demanded to know how the form supported the content or questioned my use of oil paint over, say, neon or sound or resin, I would think they were a colossal twat. But I would still have a defence. Til now, anyway. 

With these abstracts, I have no plan. No theme. No specific emotion I’m trying to evoke, no particular experience I’m trying to process, other than just being alive, and they’re not friggin’ working. 

Well then. Time to declare myself.

Gonna get drunk and write my manifesto.

It’s ok everyone, I am going to save painting. Stand back, I am ablaze with purpose.