A composition borrowed from a Harold Knight painting in Glasgow museum collections. It seems to be of a woman sewing. It’s from that period of British realism, between the wars - painters like Meredith Hampton, James Cowie, Dod Proctor. Something a bit creepy about a lot of it. Frozen people. Life doesn’t really look like this even though the word realism is insisted on. There seems no wind or smell in these paintings. I felt the urge to make a copy and then everything goes through some change and tweak until until a third thing is made, not Knight’s and not wholly mine. A mutation.

If you work in any of the modernist idioms in any approximate way: Expressionism, Fauvism, Surrealism, Minimalism, etc I think you are better off allowing yourself to be influenced by sources which are seemingly quite different from your work rather than close. Soutine didn’t care much for Modern art and preferred absorbing Rembrandt and Dutch golden age still lifes, than say Kokoshka.
So much art making is accident and just happens to be the way it turns out.

“I was sick and tired of everything
When I called you last night from Glasgow “

Lyrics from songs have a peculiar effect of detaching themselves from the meaning, so that you sing them in the rhythm that they have without often listening properly to their content. The more successful the song the more this often happens. A transformation into sound. Singing “Sittin at the dock of the bay” I’ve never actually thought of somebody sitting in a dock on a bay, it’s just a sound that through repetition and context and the feeling put into it, that starts to generate a meaning in itself, a pure expression. It’s what the best art can do.