Friday 6 February 2015

I've been out of action for a few days after a bit of "keyhole surgery" - the surgeon must have had in mind the keys to the Tower of London.  No riding my bike to the studio for a while, but I can drive so I get to enhance my carbon footprint, yay.  I want to get out and paint, but carrying french easels and the rest of the kit is off limits for a week or so.  My friends of the Brass Monkeys painting group (all weathers - you get the reference) are meeting near Richmond Park on Sunday, which is close to me, so I might have to get out, with a little sketch book instead of oil paints.
There's something wonderful about painting, or drawing, in a group, which I've only recently appreciated.  As someone who's spent decades working alone, I'd built up a resistance to being overlooked - paintings often look strange when they're in progress, so I'd find myself needing to explain what I was working towards.  I also suffer a dip in confidence in the middle of almost every painting I do, when it isn't going exactly how I envisaged, but its new, and sometimes better direction hasn't yet emerged, and it's only long experience that's taught me to persevere.  At this stage I'm not at my most sociable.  I have a piece of paper pinned to the studio wall with something I found on the interwebs to remind me that this is a universal process, it says:

The Creative Process
This is awesome
This is tricky
This is shit
I am shit
This might be ok
This is awesome

Not always awesome but almost always better than I feared in the middle.  And working alongside experienced painters, the bad language is usually understood and tolerated.

Here's a painting I finished just before the op, for the producers of the Carole King musical "Beautiful", which is opening this month in London, having been on Broadway for a while.  It's acrylic on canvas, 70x60cm.  I'd have preferred to use oils, but it had to be dry, scanned and prints made in a couple of weeks.  I've done similar paintings for the shows "Legally Blonde" (all pink) and "Shrek" (all green).
"Beautiful in London",  Acrylic on Linen,  70x60cm