Blog

A few days ago I dreamed of colours. Whether I was actually asleep and dreaming, or I had just woken up and having the first dreamy and fuzzy thoughts of the day, I'm not sure. But I'll call it a dream. I was reminding myself to paint with some colours I had generally not used a great deal previously. First there was a light lilac, and it was very opaque and dominant. Second, a strong green, like British Racing Green, also dominant, but working with the lilac in a partnership of roughly equal surface coverage. 

It is hard. All painting is hard, but abstract painting, without the traditional preconceived ideas and planning, without the carefully drawn-out image ready to be filled in, without the pre-designed contours in mind,  seems impossibly difficult. But without these guides, which are in fact what I call tyrannies, making you do things which you don't really want to do, abstract painting is very hard. It's not just a case of slopping on and scraping off, sanding down, layering, and doing all these sort of Instagram things we see, and which can be so mesmerising while watching them. There still has to be skill and wise choices and good decisions, and there still needs to be good draughtsmanship and awareness of shape, colour and composition, and so on. And then of course, knowing when to stop. No one wants to stop; only a couple of minutes more and it'll be done. More likely hours, and then stuff is lost for ever because of tiredness or ordinary poor judgement.

I felt very invigorated this week, obviously because I'd been inspired  by stuff seen on Instagram. I worked on two old paintings which I'd been very dissatisfied with for a while and determined to liven them up and take some chances with them. I'm aware that in the past my paintings have somehow reflected an uptight attitude, even when I'd converted to abstraction, where tight edges, carefully drawn contours and solid colour fields dominated, and all felt a bit 'filled in'. This was despite my efforts to work more loosely and without anxiety, as in my drawings of the last year or two.

It appears now that after many hours of trying and failing, of wrong turns and backward steps, of losing text and images, and having to redo them, I have finally solved the problem of the Webador Blog. It still took me sometime to locate this specific space and begin typing however, but I am learning bit by bit. Therefore the previous two posts, and this new one, are now part of a working Blog where posts are saved in a secure Webador area outside and beyond the website itself. This means the posts cannot be accidentally deleted. Unwanted drafts still in the Pages area of the editor can be  safely deleted to avoid cluttering up the site, while their duplicates are held secure in the blog. I'm not very savvy with all of this, and other people may find it a good deal easier. 

Despite my best efforts I think this is still a page of text and not a blog as such. I have tried and tried to set up a blog page but have given up after hours of frustration. But I'll keep trying because I know I'm missing something somewhere, and it's probably very simple and obvious. This Webador site has been great so far - it's cheaper than the others I have tried, and much easier to develop, much less complex and easier to work out ways of getting to where you want to go. In fact I have just managed to enlarge this default text size quite easily. But this blog issue is a problem because all the AI generated instructions, explanations and so called help on Google are useless for a beginner. I have found no help anywhere, so beware! We will see how I get on at a later time but for now this page will have to do.

Welcome to my first blog. As I’m not sure what to write about yet, or how to write about it, I've decided to tell it as it is this morning. I came into my little studio at about 8am, which is quite late for me, with 7am starts being more usual. But it is very dark and dreary outside and I felt like sitting down in front of the tv news with a second cup of coffee.