Happy New Year!

I'm easing myself into 2022 slowly by revisiting this painting. Not sure if I prefer this version to the original at the moment. I'll put up a bigger version, together with the earlier version in the Public Spaces painting portfolio for the moment.

Much still to tidy up from the last year - and the one before that - before committing to new projects. I'm back in hospital this week for another operation, cancer threatening to colonise colon this time. I'm still pretty weak from the last round of surgery, radio and chemo. I also still have a feeding tube, though I am eating a little most days, though I have very little saliva production and find a lot of things I used to love to eat really difficult now. Surgery will probably knock me back a little, but it is a salutary reminder to get on with stuff. My New Year's resolution is to go easy on the morphine this time. Anyway, the booze still works - though it's always a balance between wetting the whistle now and getting a much drier mouth. It's all pretty tiring: lymphodema seems to have made it difficult to breathe easily - and the dry mouth means frequently waking up through the night, but that said this is preferable to the alternative - and there really isn't any alternative.

I wouldn't quite say I was glad to see the back of 2021. A bugger of a year for us all, and a lot of hospital time for me, but it did put things in perspective and that helped get things done, or helped just enjoying not bothering with stuff I didn't really care about.

Much to do in 2022! Have a good one!

My article on some of the connections between my poetry and painting "Ut pictura poesis: as in painting so in poetry" has just appeared on the Showcase pages of the Royal Literary Fund website.

Click on the link below to read: https://www.rlf.org.uk/showcase/ut-pictura-poesis/

The article is illustrated by this older version of my painting of a cyclist on the campus at York University. Over the last few days I decided to return to this painting and I'll post the latest version in a day or two

View from Concourse over King's Cross Station. Size: 102 x 127 cm. Medium: oil on canvas. Date: 2019-2021

 

Over the late summer, I revisited the large painting of King's Cross which I started a couple of years back. Lockdown and illness intervened, but I'm glad I went back to it. This time I decided I wanted to make more of individuals in the crowd, and putting together this composite crowd from scores of drawings and photographs was absorbing though time-consuming. The focus is less on the architecture now as the picture seems to have developed something of Brughel's busy scenes about it. I'm thinking now about further ways to depict crowds, though probably with fewer highly-delineated figures; maybe something that catches mass movement.

When time permits I hope to be in a position to update my blog.