DAVID HOCKNEY: does size matter?

Yesterday I went to see this very BIG exhibition at the Royal Academy. 

David Hockney is loveable. The politely jostling, smiling crowds lining up to bask in the glow of his latest pictures surely agree. His status as a National Treasure is not in doubt and even though he's lived a large part of his life in Los Angeles, Englishness can never be divorced from Hockney anymore than it can be from cups of tea, Monty Python or the Beatles. However, California did leave large thumb-prints in the Hockney psyche and, in my irrelevant opinion, that is a shame. 

Before I launch into my critique, I must affirm that I am among those who love Hockney. I wish he was my friend so that we could have stimulating conversations about painting, buzzing with insight and discovery. I love his mercurial enthusiasms, his analytical and perceptive eye, his humour, impishness and no-bullshit bluntness, his inventiveness, committment, and the loneliness lurking behind the panache. So, with all that loveability plus the National Treasure status to contend with, I feel rather hesitant about airing my view of the current exhibition. There must be many sycophants in Hockney's entourage and I wonder if even his friends dare express anything along the lines of: hey, Emperor, aren't you feeling the cold? Well, here goes. Deep breath. 

Too many of the paintings in this show are there because of their BIGNESS, because that was the agreed gimmick, but I can't believe that the curators, and Hockney himself in his heart of hearts, could not see the eye-watering superficiality of, for instance:The Arrival of Spring in Woldgate, East Yorkshire (oil on 32 canvases joined together). As a cheery restaurant mural or a backdrop for a Disney frolic, okay, it could work. But the appropriate format for it is a greeting card, ordinary greeting card size. What is the point of a super-gigantic painting, whether on a single canvas or a grid of 32 canvases, if everything about it is small and superficial, both in concept and execution? 

As for the painting inexplicably chosen for the poster and all the advertising:Winter Timber 2009, am I the only one who sees limp spaghetti or McDonald fries instead of logs laid out on the road? Is it possible that the famously acute Hockney eye did not notice this unfortunate ressemblance? As a brilliant draughtsman, how could he be satisfied with this banal image, which doesn't even have the saving grace of being a joke? Contrary to the BIGGER PICTURE theme of the exhibition, it is the largest works which are the least interesting, the most contrived, whereas it is in smaller single canvases, sketchbooks, and some marvellous charcoal drawings of trees that the unique Hockney talent is evident. 

David Hockney Winter Timber 2009 (oil on 15 canvases)

Van Gogh in Arles was obviously on Hockney's mind much of the time when he was painting en plein air in Yorkshire but Vincent's engagement and struggle with nature is a world away from David's in every respect. I don't mean this negatively: my favourite landscapes in this show are those in which Hockney has translated Van Gogh into Hockney-ish. My least favourites are those in which he lets his California, or rather his Hollywood, take over his Yorkshire. The iPad-ish cleverness, laid-back speediness, ice-cream colours and shadowless light, the cinematic showmanship - all very L.A.

But the Hockney I deeply admire is the terrifically original boy of the 1960s and 70s, before California had seeped into his Bradford psyche. His paintings, drawings and etchings of that period are truly inspirational to me. Now that he's back in England (for a while?) maybe the next stage in his work will be the fusion of those two worlds - perhaps a Smaller Picture, but a deeper one. David Hockney still has a lot of creating to do. 

By the way, a lot of the reviews and catalogue commentaries mention the fact that he painted most of these landscapes en plein air, actually standing in front of the actual scene, outdoors in all kinds of weather, as though this is something extraordinary that nobody has done since the nineteenth century. Huh? What planet do they live on? Artists, brilliant ones as well as mediocre ones, Sunday painters and every day painters, have never stopped painting and drawing en plein air. So there. 

I loved the 9-camera, 18-screen films at the end of the exhibition. Eye and mind-expanding.

If you're in London, go see this exhibition, it's absolutely worth a long, slow look. Disregard my comments and make up your own mind. Try to ignore the crowds and plant yourself assertively in front of anyone blocking your view. And it's easier to get tickets in person at the Academy rather than online.

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TOO MANY WORDS

Not writing about the riots because thousands of words are being written and spoken about the situation and I don't have anything useful to add. Those who have said the most useful things are not politicians or pundits but people whose actions are better than words, people like Camila Batmanghelidh. Or like the man in the street who had served time in jail and told a reporter that instead of wasting money and time to lock young mayhem-makers in jail for a few months, they should be put to work clearing up the mess and making amends to the communities, and individuals they have damaged. And though I'm certainly not a Daily Telegraph reader, this article also hit some nails squarely on the head. 

I had no intention of making a word-painting and the image below evolved like this: first I covered a large sheet of paper with splashy abstract shapes of the gestural kind. Then I decided to do a splashy self-portrait over the top. Then I painted over it with a grid of heavy white brushstrokes. Then I wanted some abstract shapes to fill each rectangle of the grid. Then I saw that letters made the best shapes. Then the words emerged. 

Greenyellowbluered    Acrylic and ink on paper

 

The next picture is not relevant to anything and I regret falling into the cat-blogging trap once more but Pushkine (she is female) dropped in again and is just too photogenic to resist. 

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LUCIEN FREUD IS DEAD

HEAVY-WEIGHT CHAMP LUCIAN FREUD R.I.P.

Last year I caught his exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and wrote about it on July 26th . I wasn't a big fan but I pay homage to his life-long dedication, his single-minded focus and his prodigious skill. There was something athletic, something of the spirit of the weight-lifter and body-builder in his work: those huge muscles developed through sheer will-power and obsessive exercise. Maybe I'm stretching the metaphor too far but it sums up the impressions of Lucian Freud's painting I gathered over the years. Freud and Francis Bacon were close friends and both of them, in their work, were deeply concerned with flesh. But in my view, Bacon was the greater painter because he dared to look beyond or behind matter and those glimpses, though terrifying, allowed his paintings to break through the density, the weight of matter, in startling ways. This is just my opinion of course and it may be completely skewed. 

Next post, I'm going to write about abstract art. Stay tuned for further skewed opinions. 

The weather in London today. 

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MORE ABOUT MY FATHER: Part 3

To give you some idea of how Sacha's concept was presented to the students, I've done the rough sketch/montage below but it's nowhere near accurate. Why didn't anyone think of keeping a photographic record of the whole experience? Too busy, I guess. 

 

My father had gathered an enthusiastic team of volunteers and everyone pitched in with ideas and work. Two giant wooden spools were built by a local carpenter and a very long roll of canvas was wound around them. With the spools positioned an appropriate distance apart, mounted on spindles and rotated by two people standing at either end, hidden by curtains, the sequence of images painted on the canvas slowly unrolled before the audience.

The students - no more than about five or ten at a time - sat on high-backed chairs in one of the large, beautiful rooms of the house. In dim light, a recorded narration and music were played, paced to match the unwinding canvas. A film, without film technology. There were no computers, no PowerPoint, no DVDs or CDs at the time but the performance was all the more intriguing for being so low-tech and DIY. 

Where is that recording of the House of Contrasts script? I don't know, but I do have a copy of some of the text. Where is that huge roll of canvas? Possibly in Rome, in storage, unless destroyed. And who painted it? Um...moi...with slight assistance from an Italian multi-media artist and conversationalist. 

When I first walked into the Villa Ulivi, I was astonished by the buzz of creative activity. My mother and little brother had arrived from New York as well as several relatives from France, recruited to help with the proceedings. There were also the Italian crew and of course my older sister Annie (autobio P.16) a key player in my father's scheme. Annie was working at the time for a student travel company in New York and it was she who organised the visits of students to the House of Contrasts, as well as taking them to meet leading personalities on the Italian cultural scene. There she met her future husband, the writer Gerardo Guerrieri, but that's yet another story. 

My main role was to illustrate Sacha's Dante-esque script on that huge roll of canvas but I had insisted, even before seeing it, that I would need help. So my father found and somehow - unbelievably - managed to persuade a very busy artist/architect/designer to be my 'collaborator'. This collaboration was the most enjoyable I've ever experienced but it consisted almost entirely of talking. 

Before coming to Italy, I did not know that talking could be an art-form or that a mere verbal exchange could be a performance, with all the colour, magic and mystery of opera. Or that it could actually be a substitute for action. All Italians can talk this way but some are more gifted than others and Giorgio was a genius at it. I don't remember a word of what we talked about but it must have concerned the task we were supposed to be working on. Did Giorgio ever apply brush to canvas? I don't remember that either but he did have great ideas. 

The canvas had to be ready for the first presentation of the summer and Giorgio was very busy with his multiple activities so I found myself inevitably and urgently responsible for covering that six-foot tall and endlessly wide ribbon of canvas with interpretations of Sacha's verbal panorama of hellish and heavenly stereotypes. I think I used a lot of red and black in painting the hellish and a lot of pastel hues for the heavenly but apart from that, don't ask me what the finished work looked like because it has entirely escaped my memory.

What I do remember nostalgically was the table at mealtimes. There were usually at least a dozen people around the long, chunky table and much laughter and animated talk while huge bowls of pasta and fresh green salad were devoured and glasses were refilled with the local wine. Outside on the stone terrace small green lizards dozed in the sun. My little brother loved the lizards and imitated their shy, watchful concentration. Here he is at that time, making like a lizard at Villa Ulivi, the House of Contrasts. 

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FISHING FOR BIRTHDAY WISHES

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LATEST STATE OF DNA PAINTING AND PRE-BIRTHDAY REQUESTS

I've been working on it, hoping to finish before my birthday (August 7) but I can't predict what the painting wants to do. Here you see it in my studio and how it sort of flows into the surroundings. I think I'm going to change the title to PRISM . The colours in this photo do not accurately represent the real thing.

Speaking of birthday: can I have some requests as to what you, my loyal visitors, would like as my birthday post? You know, like those radio request programmes. I will try to comply with your wishes, unless they are awkward questions like, how old are you?. The answer to that, my friends, is blowing in the wind. 

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CHAOS TURNING INTO DNA

I've temporarily titled the painting My DNA. I thought it would be interesting to record its various states because the end result may be quite different to the beginning and it's a way to preserve the process. 

Everything in the picture is an edited version of things I see around me, including parts of other artworks. Building the composition from these fragments is selectively random: if a shape catches my eye, I'll put it in but not necessarily in the same place. In this process the painting is acquiring an order that looks nothing like my cluttered studio but that you could still recognise if you walked in there.

Central to the design are the figures of my parents, five times removed from reality: I am painting them from an unfinished painting which was based on an old snapshot and they were, of course, more real than that photograph and now they are gone, though their known and unknown history is still alive in me, consciously and unconsciously, as I sit in messy upstairs studio creating an illusion of orderly space with material paints on material canvas. 

In making art what has always intrigued and frustrated me is the conflict between working from life and working from imagination (which is also the conflict between abstraction and representation). I love painting from life, it's incomparably thrilling, but there always comes a point when I feel dominated, subjugated by the real and want it to get out of my way. Then down and down, round and round I go to that old black magic of inner images and concepts and that's exciting too but, oh, there comes a time when I long for the fresh air of face to face contact with the light, the shade, the shape, the space of the three dimensional so-called real world. 

As you can see in state 2, I've introduced a still-life of my palette in the foreground and will paint this as realistically as possible. But it leads into planes and perspectives which do not exist in reality and which arise spontaneously out of of some kind of inner logic. So, while I can't claim to be resolving the conflict, at least it's an attempt to do so. Only black and white thus far but colour is coming.

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UPSTAIRS AND THE UNBEARABLE NECESSITY OF CHAOS

What attracted me to this top floor flat when I first saw it was that it had an upstairs: a small, awkward-shaped, added-on loft, the sloping ceiling high enough in the middle for me to stand upright but not for any taller people. A space obviously unsuitable for large artwork but I took it anyway. Kindly friends helped to lug my heavy etching press up the narrow staircase, I had a sink installed, built racks and shelves for my equipment, and for quite a while the place served me well enough for printmaking and graphics. 

Now, almost sixteen years later, it's become less of a studio and more of a chaotic storage dump. Mea culpa, yes, but I also blame the advent of the digital age. The Mac is downstairs: that explains everything, doesn't it? A computer, a graphic tablet and thou, my muse, and we can happily ignore all of that upstairs mess - the paints, the unfinished paintings, the broken frames, the stacks of paper, the smell of solvents, the greasy rags, the bits of wood, the bottles and jars and boxes and tins and tubes of art-stuff which, the less it is used, the more it accumulates in case it will be used at a later date. 

But wait. Lately I've been neglecting downstairs (less blogging, less computering in general, did you notice?) and cautiously venturing back upstairs to sit there and think. A few nights ago - late night is usually my decision time - I resolved to start clearing the chaos. But then I noticed that the mess was visually quite intriguing so I decided to start a new large painting instead.
You can see its present stage in the middle of the bottom row of these photos. The painting will incorporate, in as yet unpredictable fashion, fragments of the things I see upstairs, including parts of an old, unfinished painting of my parents when young (middle row). The canvas is almost my height, the ceiling not high enough for an easel and the room too narrow and crowded to allow some other support so I have to work in a variety of crouching positions. But now I need the chaos to stay as it is because it's my current inspiration. 

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NdA Exhibition opens at Casa 5

It all went quite well yesterday, apart from the arrival of an uninvited horde of cockroaches a few hours before the private view in the gallery. A dozen or so were milling around the front door, obviously not art-lovers, so we attacked them with insect spray and in revenge, a whole army started crawling out, threatening to take over the premises. Much more insecticide and bashing with broomstick, then sweeping cockroach corpses out into the street. Who knows why the critters chose this particular day to emerge from wherever they were hiding, but emerge they did. Anyway by the time the real guests started arriving, the nasty intruders, dead and alive, were gone.

I exhibited 35 works on paper (works much appreciated but no sales)  plus a video interviewing some Tavira people in their surroundings. Here's a link to this video. I had to compress it a lot so it's not as sharp as the original, especially the written titles, but I hope you can still get the ambiance.

http://blip.tv/file/3281352

And below some photos of Casa 5 gallery walls before the opening. I didn't manage to take any photos while people were there, too busy chatting.

CLICK ON PICS TO ENLARGE

 

  

  

Portrait of Matthijs Leijenaar NdA Feb.2010  pastel on paper

 

 

  

  

New work progress

Words seem to be failing me since images have taken precedence. The right brain left brain division is in evidence and my left brain must be waiting for me back in London.

A lot of rain in the last couple of days and the temperature has dropped so I've been working indoors, as close as possible to a gas heater. Have been doing some monoprinting from stencils such as the first image below, not quite finished.

CLICK PICTURES  TO ENLARGE

 Cafe Azul monoprint.   NdA  Feb.2010

 

Portuguese Woman  monotype  NdA  Feb. 2010

 

Inside-Outside  NdA  acrylic on paper  Feb. 2010

TAVIRA TIME GOES BY

I can't believe I've already been here ten days! The sun is out and everything looks amazing and I want to do more than I'm doing - by more I mean less fiddling, more coherence, more simplicity. The devil is in the detail, yes, and it's devilishly difficult to resist the temptation of detail. I ruin a good start as soon as I start adding more detail, out of some kind of slavish obedience. Have just ruined the picture you see on the easel, of a woman with white shawl sitting in a cafe. That  was the start and it was okay. Now I've"finished" it and it's no good. Well, there'll be others. Not much time for blogging.

Click on photos to see full size.

1. Works in progress.
2. Tourists asleep in the sun.
3. Human made up as statue (he stands on the Roman bridge almost all day).

BEING TAVIREAN

So far, I've done a lot of walking, taken quite a few photos, done a few sketches and started one small painting. Something strange is going on inside me which is difficult to put into words. Let's just say that I'm trying to forget all that I know about art, about painting, about drawing - all those artist-voices past and present telling me what to do or not do. I want to shut them all up and just try to find out what it is that I'm interested in: is it light? Is it colour? Is it solid shapes? Is it faces? Is it space? Or none of those? I'd like to see like that dog sees.

The bottom photo is of the work table in my room at Casa 5.

TAVIRA HERE WE COME

Early on Monday morning I'm off to Tavira and, because I can't get into Dreamweaver from my laptop (probably could but won't have time to work it out) blogging until the first week of March will be only at this, my  Blogger blog and not as usual at Blaugustine's main blog.



Watch this space and au revoir, mes amis.

ANOTHER EXTRAORDINARY CYBER MIRACLE

I painted the above landscape in Florence a long long time ago, still a student, searching for my own 'voice' in art (I'm still searching). With all the moving from one country to another this painting, which I loved, was lost. 

Andrei Korliakov leaves a comment on my Blaugustine blog in French  below my Beautiful Blank Slate post of January 9th. 

I get in touch with Monsieur Korliakov, a Russian historian living in Paris.
I am amazed, dazed, enchanted and enthused when he writes back, attaching the above photo, saying he found the painting a few years ago in a Paris flea market.
It was signed so he looked my name up on the internet.

The coincidence - if it's still possible to call such entrancing synchronicities coincidence - doesn't stop there: the most traumatic and significant period of my father's life was his emigration from Russia to Paris during the chaotic events of the 1920s. Andrei Korliakov's research (and his interesting website) is concerned with Russian emigration from 1917 to 1947. 

How do these threads in the vast tangled web of human history end up linking together?
My Russian émigré father.
My father rents the Villa Ulivi in Florence for a project he's working on.
I paint the cypress trees in the Villa's fabulous garden, excited by everything I see.
Time goes by. The painting is lost.
Much much much more time goes by.
A Russian historian is browsing the marché au puces at the Porte de Vanves in Paris.
He picks up a painting he likes and notices the signature, a Russian name.
He buys the painting. Time goes by.
He looks up my website, contacts me on my blog, Blaugustine.
The lost painting is found.


Andrei invites me to visit him the next time I am in Paris. You can be sure that I will do so at the earliest possible opportunity!

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SEASONAL GREETINGS

Since these holidays are about family, however you celebrate, alone or apart, here's a fantasy family for you, perhaps an ideal one, perhaps just an ordinary one, a little bit strange in a good way.


With warmest wishes to every single person who passes this way, I hope you'll stay a while. May the New Year be kind to all of us on this troubled planet. 

(This is actually a black and white photo of an old, highly textured painting of mine which I've scanned and coloured digitally).

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TAVIRA SEQUEL

YESSSS!! 

In Tavira I noticed that there is an artists' association and gallery called Casa 5 and when I got back home I looked it up on the internet and found that they have an artists' residency programme. After a friendly exchange of emails, I sent in my application. 

Obviously I was just obeying orders from that cunning life-coach in the sky who thinks I need a kick up the cosmic derrière to propel me out of my little swivel chair in front of my little screen in my little London routine. Obviously my application was accepted. I'm all shook up!

So, around the middle or end of January I'll be going back for about five or six weeks, staying in Casa 5 and working on paintings, drawings, collage, video etc. based on Tavira - the town, the people, the ambiance, whatever inspiration strikes while I'm there - with an exhibition in the gallery at the end of my residency. I'll have my laptop and WIFI so blogging will continue, if perhaps intermittently (as usual). 

Here's an appropriate graffiti I discovered on a wall in Tavira - I didn't know when I took the picture that it would be so appropriate.

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POST-TAVIRA REPORT

POST-TAVIRA REPORT

Yes, the lion you saw in the slideshow is my cherished lion - or rather his sun-bleached and rain-battered twin. I was walking along the banks of the Gilao river in Tavira when I suddenly saw him, tied to the top of a brilliantly coloured fishing boat, looking around with a bemused expression. Call it coincidence, chance or destiny, but I find it thrilling that the twin of a stuffed lion I bought from an Asian shop in Camden Town should turn up to greet me on my very first day in a small town in Portugal. How likely is that?

Anyway, I fell in love with Tavira. Bits of it had a nostalgic familiarity, flashbacks of Paraguay or Brazil or Mexico. Other parts entirely different, Moorish, blue-tiled, whiter-than-white rough plaster walls, intricate baroque woodwork, latticed windows, and doors, doors! Amazing doors of every colour and texture, works of art in their own right. Short, human-size palm trees and very tall phallic ones, shaved so that only an ecstatic green tuft emerges from the crown, the rest of the bulbous trunk naked and scaly.

At this time of year the streets are quiet and the unpretentious cafés are frequented mainly by locals, a few polite tourists and expat residents. I sat there at ease, drinking café con leite, my forgotten Portuguese coming back in fragments, spattered with Spanish and Italian, and I thought: I could spend some time here, get back into painting, live the small-town life. The more I caressed this thought, the more exciting it felt so I got up, walked into a nearby estate agent's office and asked the dapper white-bearded man at the desk if he had any apartments to rent in the centre of town. He was Swedish, spoke perfect English, and said there were no rentals on his list at present but his colleague down the street might have some. He put a "Back Soon" sign on the door and walked out with me.

Just round the corner he pointed to the top floor of a balconied house, looking out towards the river and the Roman bridge. "There's an apartment for rent up there", he said. "Oh!" I said, "When could I see it?" "Right now," he said, "I have the keys". We walked up two or three flights and entered a delightful living room, marred only by an after-thought, a dangerously vertical wooden stairway in the middle, leading to a low-ceilinged loft bedroom with its own bathroom. Downstairs was another bedroom and bathroom and a modern kitchen. In a moment of madness I thought, yes, this is it! Fortunately the price was too high and that loft stairway too lethal.

Then we went into another agent's office across the street and the young Portuguese colleague said there were a couple of places he could show me. So my new Swedish friend and my new Portuguese friend together walked me around town and showed me two apartments, both affordable, with magnificent terraces. I said I was interested in renting for a couple of months, probably January-February, but the owner of the flat I liked best wanted a twelve-month tenancy and the other place seemed too big for me. I left my address with both agents and they said they'd let me know of anything that might come up.

When I met my brother for dinner later he was flabbergasted by my unexpected coup de foudre for Tavira and the speed of my action-on-impulse. Well, I said, if it happens it will only be for a couple of months and if it doesn't happen, that's okay. He was an excellent guide, though he only moved to Tavira in July (excruciatingly hot then and in August) and we went to his favourite spot, reached in about fifteen minutes by motorboat, the Ilha de Tavira - an idyllic island, endless expanse of pristine golden sands, deserted in winter, a nature reserve where batallions of gulls stand at attention, concentrating intensely on the waves crashing against the shore. What an error to say that birds are flighty! They are probably the most focused creatures I know of. I wish I was as focused as a bird.

Now I must focus on tasks back here at home, finish La Vie en Rosé and other unfinished things, and if there's a sequel to the Tavira adventure, of course I'll blog it. I might post some more snippets of video but there's far too much and it needs drastic editing. Strangely enough I didn't do any drawing, probably because it was too drawable and I didn't feel like adding to the vast heaving storehouse of picturesque postcardy scenes of picturesque postcardy locations all around the world.

If I ever do paint in Tavira, I would try to find a different way of communicating, filtering, translating my experience of the place into a visual language. That's what I find so fantastic in Van Gogh's paintings of Arles: they have become as popular and commercial as postcardy postcards, but the actual works are never merely picturesque. He focuses on the landscape or the chair or the sunflower with the same kind of attention that the gulls give to the waves, a hungry attention, purposeful, passionate, a desire to assimilate the object. Not at all the same as cool observation or skilful representation.

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A FUTURIST-ISH DAY AT

Yesterday I walked from London Bridge Station and joined the hungry crowds milling around the market in Green Dragon Court overflowing with delectable Jamaican, Turkish, French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, German, English delicacies then along Bankside in the warm sunshine, past the Globe Theatre and down to Taste Modern where surprisingly no one at all was queuing for tickets to the Futurism exhibition. Ended up making my own humble Futurist-ish speedy little movie which you can see below. The soundtrack is mine, made up from loops in Garage Band.

The Futurists themselves did not impress me, apart from their typography, Balla and a few others who were more Cubist than Futurist. So much more attractive when reproduced in coffee-table-size art books, the actual Futurist paintings are mostly dull and formulaic, never achieving the grandiose aims of the infamous Futurist Manifesto of 1909. Leaving aside the manifesto's glorification of war and militarism, its vilification of all art, literature, women and pasta, the paintings completely fail to convey the Futurists' declared exhilaration about modern life. What's the big deal about breaking shapes up into kaleidoscopic jigsaws? Hardly breathtaking or revolutionary. Even Severini's huge Dance of the 'Pan-Pan' at the Monico left me indifferent. Yes, it's clever and pretty and looks like an advert. I'm hard to please, sorry.


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WHOLLY HOLY REFLECTIONS

Where do I stand in the religion debate? It's easier to say where I don't stand.

Not in the Church of Atheism led by fundamentalist preacher Dawkins and fellow missionaries. Nor in the Church of Self-Idolatry frequented by insecure over and under achievers. Nor in the patchouli-scented New Age Temple of Anything Goes. Nor with the EveryWordWrittenHereIsTrue scripture-shouting Bible-thumpers. Nor with the spiritual-but-not-religious consumers and purveyors of magical recipes for getting everything you want. Nor with the guitar-strumming popsterising church huggy-muggers. Nor with the unbending Orthodoxydon't-ists. Nor with the mockers and takers of the Name in vain. Nor with the counters of angels on pinheads or eggheads. I could go on. But where do I stand?

If you've seen my God Interviews you've guessed that I'm a believer. But what does this mean, believer? Do I worship a balding cartoon character wearing a white t-shirt stamped "God"? Do I use humour to avoid the whole tricky issue? Maybe. I know that I believe in God and I know that this belief is not wishful thinking. I don't know why I know this. For me, 'Bible' and 'God' are not synonymous. Maybe 'religion' and 'God' are not synonymous either. I don't know whether the God I believe in features in the Bible or the Koran or the Torah or any other sacred book but none of them can either strengthen or weaken my belief. The faith I have seems not to depend on any of those traditions, including the fringe ones, which claim to have the last word on Divinity.

To celebrate this weekend, here is something I see as wholly holy inspiration. I had never heard of Donald Pass and luckily found him via a Google search for 'resurrection'.

I am very impressed by his work and have no doubt he did experience what he relates here and in this video. You can see Blake and El Greco as influences but I think it may be that they shared similar mystical experiences rather than artistic styles. More paintings by Pass are here.

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THE ELUSIVE SELF

The portrait has not been going well. For the benefit of anyone interested in the process, I'm posting some of the states below. I'm now on the fourth scrape-it-all-out-and-start-again: the "Better but still no good" painting, which was the latest, is no more. Kaputt.

Some of what I'm struggling with is:

1. The sad grey winter light and the shortness of days.

2. Indecisiveness about what approach I want to take.

3. Tendency to overdo and thus lose something that was going well.

4. Having become used to the speed and ease of digital painting and its marvellous "UNDO" option, unfortunately unavailable in real-life oil painting.

5. The infuriating, seductive, non-user-friendly character of oil paint.

6. An angry nostalgia for bygone years when I was able to toss off a really quite good portrait in a few hours.

7. Bad mood due to all the above plus some extra stuff not worth mentioning.

Okay, I know: Fail again. Fail better.

I'll keep going. A desire to please is the enemy. Must keep that in mind.

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