I put up a page yesterday that featured just a couple of the very few paintings I still have from before I found myself based in London (sometime in the last century). The point of that page was that I only paint like I do now in because I live in all the noise and layers and constant bombardment of East London. I kind of think (hope?) the paintings I make reflect where I live and work, the things that surround me. Before I came to London, when the notion of making art was first grabbing me, I was living on a small Island off the tip of a bigger island called Anglesey, North Wales. The sea was all around me, in every direction, wherever I looked. I find myself thinking about that more and more, I find myself wondering why I am still in London surrounded by noise and increasing alienation, I find myself wondering why I give so much to the increasingly unfriendly East London art scene, all the curation, all that writing via the pages of Organ, all those news pieces, previews, reviews (Jonny said he loved my art but all he really wanted was a news story about his latest East London art show and maybe a review of his new album). I find myself looking beyond London more and more, thinking about why I paint, what I paint, what I want to paint (do I still want to paint? Well that isn’t really an option, I have t opaint), I always though that a lot of it was about connections, about community, about people coming together to make things happen about conversations (indeed about leaving thousands of paintings out on the street for people to just take if they wish to – Jonny says he hasn’t found one yet, that he loves them and needs to find one). I find myself thinking about all this more and more, thinking I liked living on an island and looking at the sea or that line where the sea meets the sky, the same skyline I look up at in London but with none of the clutter of a London skyline. Just the line. 

Fellow painter, Richard Kenton Webb, talks about it in terms of standing on the edge of chaos as you let the sea come up to your toes but I see it as looking away from the chaos, looking out beyond it all, it always looks so calm. so inviting (when it probably isn’t) that perfect point where sky meets sea, that line that often isn’t that clear. nothing is that clear at the moment, making art is full of conflict right now, where once I was going to art shows almost every night, now I don’t, I do paint everyday,  feels like a great big roundabout and I can’t work out which road I really want to take, part of me still wants to paint big noise and layers of Hackney leaf life, part of me wants to jump on a train to Margate or Eastbourne, part of me wants far more than just seaside treats. Yesterday I painted Margate, but I didn’t go to Margate, She did, and sent me a photo of where she was. I imagined the line, The Line, I could see it in my head, I painted it from here in East London on the day before the Summer Solstice. I looked at both paintings this Solstice morning and they really are just test pieces, working up to things far bigger, it is going to take a lot of painting before I can convey that thing I feel, that thing I can see with that line.