It is said that the journey is more important than the destination, and what a journey life is when you take it as it arrives day by day.
awakening to a new dawn, summer here and a sudden realisation that I can do no more than I have done already in my current situation.
An email made me realise that my friends I left in college were now weeks away from their final piece of their degree course, has it really been two years since my leaving.
I had to look back over all of the works completed during that period and was surprised to realise that I have done over 300 pieces during that time, I also had to accept that the range of genre and styles that I had painted in during that time were much more than a mere two years work, in fact all of them I had to view as part of my learning curve, a learning curve that had to make up for the loss of many years of wearing other hats in search for self, they are my experimentals.
I knew that morning that something was different, that there was a change, not so much a change in style or genre but of a change of scale, the local suppliers of canvases had served me well bringing me from cheap and cheerful paper upto to the largest canvas that they supplied; the sad thing for me was that the canvas' that they supplied simply were not big enough for me to be as expressive as I wanted to be.
Pieces completed recently had 'stuff' missing at the extremes of the canvas perimeters which meant that there was a piece of me missing from the works, it was restrictive, it was not right.
It was very apparent, I have to grow and the only way to do this was to make my canvas' grow and that would mean now having to produce my own stretchers and find a new canvas supplier.
The images are my first attempt which by and large was successful, however I now have to strip the thing down, even after an enjoyable experience of priming with gesso the following morning I found a large canvas that showed me where I had made all the mistakes both in construction and in priming.
The canvas shrank overnight so much that it pulled the corners in from one side, the central supporting posts were too far forward and created long and raised lumps, in fact so tight had the canvas pulled that I had created three separate painting areas, each separated with a ridge where the posts showed through, Oh well, back to the drawing board as they say, I wonder what the man who invented the drawing board went back too, a ponderance though not for the now.
