At first he looked like an ancient Chinese man, Confucius maybe. I was using a sketch I did from a photo of someone at a Stonehenge celebration. As it stood I could not use the drawing it didn’t seem to be something I could develop from there. I really needed to see the photo again so I had to search for it again. Now the original drawing is gone, painted over and I have a well an even stranger picture; a strange painting of a strange man at a Stonehenge festival. What is his hat, his headgear. It seems like an electronic device, I see it as the persons way of communicating with the spiritual world. A reciever maybe, a listening device, workable or not. Then he seems to have a scarlet cloak draped from his forearms, like a Roman soldiers cloak. His hair is a Rastafarian plaited hair style. And he wears sleeveless fur jacket.
Well here I am making a painting of a subject that normal people will not consider putting on their wall. It might never have a chance of a new home anywhere, ever. I’d be better off painting a vase of roses.
I imagine though an interesting man going on a spiritual journey searching for something, going where the wind takes him, unafraid to explore the unknowable world around him.
Each painting I do seems to effect me somehow. The more I get absorbed in it the more I think and feel about it, the more I have to change to know it, to paint it truthfully as I can. That’s why at first, the picture had only it’s surface value. My drawing then was a fault, I had found a subject that was of interest but I had been typically superficial about it.
I spend more time just looking at it than painting it. What do artist do all day goes the blurb. Am I even an artist, I don’t know. Society and me are miles apart.
