Morning,11am, Riverbank

Morning, 11am, Riverbank, oil on card, 7.9 x 10 cm

Painted among the reeds. I will not do more from this location for a while as I fear repetition, except for one last wider view of the roadbridge and the creek.

In the morning herons gather here in their beautiful white plumage, breakfasting in low tide.

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It is lovely to be working in this way, in the "footsteps of giants"; muddy common sense painters like Constable, Ruisdael. Much is made of the importance of artists as radicals, innovators and revolutionaries. But few artists truly posess the nous for originality, so it would surely be better if more emphasis were placed on artists' abilities to follow and celebrate the traditions they are party to.

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I came across a blanket among the grasses there, lying on a pile of pages from a promotional fashion catalogue, the faces and bodies of models in mannered poses. To think of those images forming a bed there: something strange and tragic about it: I had broken into another man's privacy.

Forest and Swamp -stage 5; painting and tradition

“If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa.

To revive and sustain Western painting we have to ask, "What is it for?" "Whose ends should it serve?" How to revive it will follow as a consequence.

Too many painters are replying to these questions with, "it should survive because it has a glorious tradition", or "because I like doing it," as if these were ends in themselves, neglecting the obvious fact that the tradition is a creation of express political and social purposes. With their reply comes asceticism and aesthetic obscurity.

How painting can compete with speedier, noisier media is another question. Perhaps the best way for it to cope is to use the new media and to try to use its slowness and reflectiveness as a means of increasing viewer attention and concentrations, offering painting as an alternative to the frequent superficiality of faster media.