I have been away but now we're back, and between the whites and lilacs as they say, which makes it june, which means we have been on a furlough of sorts from our dignity scholarship work for some ten weeks, which means we owe you an explanation. No doubt you were wondering what had become of us and being as tolerant and understanding as I have come to expect you only made a direct enquiry last week.1 But don't think we take you for granted and please forgive my terse reply to your note.2 I only wanted the chance to explain my absence properly and had hoped to do so before receiving word from you. The fault is mine, but look here, I have just now taken up a position on the flygfyran deck (a real solar trap) with the express intention of affording you a full account of my absence which will demonstrate to you in no uncertain terms that we have not taken our eye off the Doing ball and on the contrary we have even rolled on a few turns in both thought and practice.
The BLM protests are underway and have grown so large and spread so far that it would seem to have become an outlet for anti alt right populism generally. Hurrah!
I am very low on supplies and Jacksons have run out of canvas and titanium with nothing expected until July. Boo! We shall limp through our blossoms campaign nonetheless.
Letter 685 from 85 regarding local color has really clicked with us and will bring about some positive results I have no doubt. I’m tickled pink.
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You see it is the pandemic that steered us off course but our two month lay off was never planned, it just evolved. It began innocuously enough with the sending of some 'hello' video messages to David Green, our one time benefactor in London. You will no doubt be aware of the stricter measures taken in the UK to combat the pandemic involving a complete lockdown across the population with the exception of medical staff and staff at essential merchants; food and medicines. But all this we covered in our last couple of entries, what changed for us however is that in recording some jolly messages to Dave as a morale booster in times unknown we took the opportunity to show him what we Do on a daily basis, from the making of the stretchers, preparing the support and the painting process itself, all to show what his investment has resulted in. After one or two posts of this tattle it became clear that we really owed Dave a more serious explanation as to how we spent the money and why we fell so short on our predicted sales and that these messages might be the best way to provide a full and honest account. Following several more pledge laden, excuse ridden posts we found ourselves trying to justify our DS work within the context of the loan to make the case that not all is lost and that while no sales are on the horizon, we work on with far greater purpose than was ever the case in the commercial realm. Is there not a far greater prize may be won by pursuing the bolder course of art and ideas?
In one particular bout of self justification I casually hinted that I would need a dozen such messages to explain myself fully and shortly after we received a response from Dave in which he reassured us a little regards the repayments ’these things happen in business’ and even expressed the desire hear more about the new direction and the Dignity Scholarship because: ”I have a gap in my schedule the size of a pumpkin, so go ahead, tell me whats on your mind”. It felt like my bluff was called and it reminded me very much of when John Kerry unthinkingly blurted out that Syria is hardly about to announce a weapons inspection program and by the next day with Russian backing they put one together. Well in any case that scrap of encouragement was the starting pistol for a two month, 33 episode hiatus into the world of the plain air ’you tuber’ which became so absorbing that our Dignity Scholarship work was put onto the back burner and the gas turned off! Now, with our excuses made to Dave we now must beg your pardon for abandoning our season 2 commitments3 and this after such a shameless display of begging performed by ourselves to be granted the second season!
I can hardly believe it, after the tumultuous beginning it is now half past season and we are forced to restart once more. This time however we have a clear road to the horizon of autumn when it will be decision time again but I dare not imagine lobbying for a third season, at least until we have at least thirty good oils in the bag. While we say it is a clear road we have already learned that there is no such thing, you cannot account for the future just as you mustn't forget about all the things you don’t know, but I know this; the US election is not even taking place until November! That was supposed to be the backbone of our season narrative and our reason for prizing 2020 as ’the year of years’ and it is not even within our time frame. Did you know? So with my fathers passing, the pandemic and the election out of our bounds we are left with a season in tatters but the video hiatus has at least kept us Doing and while I do not intend to write an account of each work of what we eventually called ’The Wretched Painter series’, I would like to bring it in as an appendage to the DS season and to do this in the shape of ink drawings made from the originals which I will slip in along side the regular posts. This has several benefits, it will allow us to try the pen and ink method which Van Gogh used for most of his drawings, and it will let us reference his practice of creating large drawn works from his finished paintings which is so brilliantly presented by old Pickvance, the two mediums influencing each other so wonderfully.
I bet my mother an apple munk that Cummings would survive.4 She was so sure he was a goner. While I have been on a very low news media intake I see the snippets on my fleeting visits to my mother and it has been all about Cummings and his flouting of the lockdown rules boa boa boa, but why would he go? He could either resign or be sacked by the Eton Trump and why would they do that? Like everything else to do with politics in the post truth era the game of resignation is a changed, anyway to the work at long last and as you can see we have a set of blossom studies three small size 10’s, two medium at 70 x 50.
We have all but run out of white following these.
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I have gotten used to the frustrations of the blossoms after some four years now of trying to mount an attack. Every year they seem to take us by surprise and we a found scrambling to gather materials for a full go while they are in bloom and that timeframe varies as does the amount of blossoms. Added to all that is the fact that it is a very challenging subject and one needs a little time to relearn the best approach. This year saw us busy with The Wretched Painter right up until the blooming and with little canvas left and none prepared our first three studies were on bits of board I found lying about in the upstairs part of laden. They were alright for a practice but hardly likely to get us any further towards the goal of the Van Gogh 88’s, particularly the trip tic in Amsterdam that took me inn on my visit a few years past. The two larger study were taken in the Bergby garden. With the first more liberties than usual were taken in the editing of the scene which I have penned back to just the tree and the neighbors huge barn on the left. It all looks a bit spare but the point is to focus on the blossom which was built up with consecutive salvos in pink, yellow, orange hues of off white; many many many. The trunk violet.
The second of the 70 x 50’s show another apple tree at an earlier stage of bloom. Here we fell slightly into the trap of establishing the surroundings first, too much, before setting the tree in resulting in a lack of focal point. The color sucks also. It was these twin failures which made reading letter 685 so illuminating.
Perhaps there is something to these but my conclusion is that we are setting upon the same path as last year and the year before and to strike out we must do something different. Was it not Einstein who said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results? Well that is not what we think, has he not heard of practice? But we do need a shift and I believe that a larger scale is the next move because the small to mediums have dominated all our blossom efforts due to our imagining of the blossoms to be a campaign in which one must amass as many works as possible while one can leading one to refrain from larger scale work, and look here, the Van Gogh blossoms that we love and must emulate are far larger than anything we have yet tried.
So with my remaining white I will tackle one or two much larger studies and that will likely be our attack on the blossoms for 2020. Having said that there are various blossomings that would be fine subjects, the lilacs for example, and of course the rowan trees but they produce much later on towards autumn. It has become a little crowded on the deck here and although we are the regulation two meters apart we have drawn a few stern looks from the good folk keen on enjoying their daily bulbar in the sun, which our sitting here typing our post is preventing. It would seem to be an unacceptable occupation of fika space but no worries, we have just about got it said.
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With a Handshake,
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John
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1 We wanted to check that John was happy.
2 John reacted angrily to our enquiry, but thats okay.
3 John is free to do what he wants and our only wish is to hear about his Doing.
4 British political scandal in which the employment of Cummings, the alt right political advisor to the prime minister. A 'munk' is a doghnut.
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