An unsuccessful exercise based on the idea of the arch of the ex-raIlway bridge, just down the road from Michael’s house, as the centre-piece of a landscape medley.

This and the layered image to the right were a single painting which I then sawed into two bits because they did not work together but were each interesting images singly. Neither is yet finished in their independent existence.

 

This many-layered geometric abstract was great fun to do and became quite a good painting; but it takes me nowhere because I can produce such images all too readily.

Similarly with curvaceous abstracts of this sort: there’s no point in my making them because I can readily do so. There’s little challenge left, particularly when I compose it around such a cliched idea as white/black, light/dark. That said, the attenuated black female figure in the centre on the frontier between light and darkness is morphologically interesting and worth a comment later on.

Then I returned to a figurative fantasy using ink-wash on an A1 sheet of paper. Stylistically, this is familiar territory from last year chez Michael, containing several of the elements used then from my thesaurus of landscape features such as church, Avebury-style stones and boat. Overall, it does not work here, however, so I amused myself by ‘cutting’ it into two paintings on-screen (but not actually) to produce two  reasonably good images.

   

 

Then, to finish off with something completely different, I horrified Michael by producing this ‘Shaman at the burial mounds’ in glorious technicolour apparently out of nothing; though the mounds look suspiciously like those in several ‘Sutton Hoo’ paintings I’ve done over the years. I don’t know where the Shaman originates but I suspect there’s a KKK half-memory in at least the head-gear. I have to work more on his eyes and probably dispose of the moon, which is unnecessary.

Even more unexpected was the very last painting I did in about three minutes after I thought I had finished. In fact I was taking the jars of diluted ink  to tip them down the sink when I saw a 3 ft. length of shelving wood lying to the side. It seemed such a waste not to use the redundant ink on its inviting surface and, using my fingers, this image resulted. I know full well where its origins lie but there is no need to explain because Michael liked it and told me to leave it just as it was and still is. Oddly, this impulse image at the end of the last day may be the one piece of original art I did all week.