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Dear Alex and Mary
Thanks so much for your comments. I am very pleased to hear you respond so well to this painting. I am trying to get out of the frame of mind of finishing a painting i.e just making the ear slightly better or being excited about the way an arm suggests itself accidentally out of some vigorous paint and then painting it neatly to make it able to be seen by others, as well as being accepted for being a finished painting. What I am trying to do is leave the exciting, suggestive paint as the core idea for the painting and then work the rest of it in harmony with that. I am also trying to simplify the paintings i.e if I am thrilled by the light and dark of a face I want to now leave it at that, not add in the body, the clothes etc. to make it make sense to the viewer because then it loses it's aesthetic logic which (I need to remember) is not everyday logic. A face can live by itself in a painting in a mass of dark - it doesn't need an more references to an environment and a body; it doesn't need to eat and walk or anything else that we need in our everyday, physical reality because it's world is one of philosophic, aesthetic, poetic reality - it is an idea.
I am no good at finishing paintings in the traditional sense, and mostly doing it makes me unhappy. This painting - started and thought about for a week, and then finished in two days (as opposed to 2 quite miserable months of worrying and killing the thing) was lovely to do.
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