Friend or foe?

The progress I was making in my recent canvas paintings came to a halt this week. Given the close links between my painting and my life, it is hard to tell whether this halt was the cause of a recent downgrade in my positivity, or the result of it. Sometimes cause and effect can be too closely entwined to be separately indentified and it is not always worth the effort of trying.

The two canvases sit in my studio and I stare at them. The exciting immediacy of my recent paper paintings, which was the impetus behind these new works, has not really translated over as well as I had hoped. There could be two reasons for this.

Firstly, I may be investing too much fraught care and attention here, which is more or less the antithesis of what I had been doing with the paper paintings. Their immediacy has given way to lengthy consideration and second guessing, Secondly, I fear that the concept underpinning these pieces may simply be too thin, have been given to little consideration, to hold up.

These are just two possible reasons for my halt and they come at the end of a darker week than I have had in some time. Perhaps now that I am climbing out of that darkness, I will find a way to move forwards with these two pieces. However, my inclination is to dive back into small paper pieces and see where they take me. Next week, with luck and a tail wind, I'll have something new to show!