[untitled water painting, acrylic on linen, 20cm x 20cm]dear reader, would you buy this painting? it's never been in a gallery or an exhibition (it has no picture frame) and it's very unlikely to be. i seem to have a lot of paintings (or works) like this - many things started, but never really finished. if i add up the work i haven't really finished to the other work which i think is done, then the work soon mounts up...
so what is it with this imagined water surface? i always tell myself not to use philosophy to express a thought which i would never have entertained myself, so to paraphrase Nietzsche, the higher you fly the smaller you will look to those on the ground, is an idle thought which seems relevant to this feeling of uncertainty, a conflict or contradiction, between what you want and what you get by doing something...
within the perceived depths of water (rather than the sky) perhaps it is the counterpoint to thinking that, being above and yet below, in the ebb and the flow, but what do i know..?..the element of water, the high seas, the oceans, ships and shorelines, rivers and ports, a significant part of family history, and then making a small connection...it is not the river that influenced this small painting; it could be the weather, the rain, the floods, the seashore and the waves. perhaps it is an ocean (in the shade of blue), and where there is an ocean there is also the air and the big blue sky, but sometimes clouds, or storms, forming and dispersing, influencing, mirroring, moving, from one element into another...anyhow, it's just a thought......[see also: on the surface, water paintings]