The Stories of the Street

 The stories of the street, oil on card, 17 / 15 cm  NOT FOR SALE

A man walking in Santa Monica, oil on card, 14 / 13.5 cm    AVAILABLE

Two new pictures: I stole the title from Leonard Cohen's famous song from his 1967 album, Songs of Leonard Cohen.

The stories of the street are mine
The Spanish voices laugh
The Cadillacs go creeping down
Through the night and the poison gas
I lean from my window sill
In this old hotel I chose.
Yes, one hand on my suicide
And one hand on the rose.

 Cohen's is one of a number of late 60's street songs: there are also good ones by Springsteen and Dylan.

Santa Monica is not really the place, it's much too prim: I want tenement blocks, grandeur, disorder: Harlem, Glasgow, or even parts of Estreito here, where'll I'll soon go to paint similar.

The big green hill; travel sketching; USA trip

The big green hill, oil on card, 11 x 8.5 cm

A heavy day; my mood awful throughout.

Beautiful heathland in Lagoa, under threat of suburbanisation but still a pleasant place to escape- the smell of the damp grass very pleasant and larks and butterflies everywhere.

I thought of Leonard Cohen's words from, "True Love Leaves No Traces," as I worked:

As the mist leaves no scar

On the dark green hill

So my body leaves no traces

On you, and never will

Through windows in the dark

The children come, the children go

Like arrows with no targets,

Like shakles made of snow

*

A couple of days ago I passed the morning reading through an exhibition catalogue of Edward Lear's watercolours, painted on his travels: I have the idea of doing much the same on my USA trip, which is still in it's embyro stages (any help/ advice gratefully accepted: I'm especially interested in linking up with other painters in the USA, and the possibility of showing work and ideally selling some to help pay for the trip).

What is delightful about Lear is that his work is so closely tied to his experience, and even if conpositionally the pictures are often using the jaded formats of Lorrain or Poussin, it's possible to access his personality through his handling of pencil and wash.

Sketchbook work is often so; I have previously mentioned Ardizzone here, I might also mention Zymunt Turkiewicz's "Montecassino" , a very immediate album of drawings illustrating the Polish fores assault on the german stronghold in Italy (pub. 1944) and the drawing produced by Mervyn Peake as an official War Artist.