Indeed those are the times when one needs all the endorphins one can get and my entire supply comes from the brush. We can perhaps hope that regular, official, employment brings an endorphin or two in via the back door in the guise of 'doing the right thing' and 'providing for the family' is some orthodox fashion. We'll soon see no doubt, but look here, we are not some good for nothing. We are not shy of the shift. We have a proud history of grass cutting and road work behind us in the the boroughs of Leicester, Leamington Spa and Plymouth, not to mention an equally rich employment history in the fabrik world as assembler, picker or operator. We can take to the shifts without skipping a beat but the issue that complicates such a simple program is that of my mothers general care and more to the point, my desire to keep that care family centered and not administered by some well meaning, professional but woefully inadequate care outfit.1 There is a care that only family can provide and with herself over here, now alone, it is not something that can be set down as easy as all that.
Sambo Helen is looking for me. I can see her checking the cabins, now the boat house.
The study above is a night painting in point of fact. We took it from the edge of the field opposite the road side of the house, perhaps only 20 meters from the window. The moon is barely exaggerated I shit you not but the giant effect seemed to last only a very short time. We spent most of the study waiting for it to pop up over the treeline, using the time to lay in the field and sky. It was light enough to paint quite comfortably raising the question as to whether this does indeed qualify as a night picture? Van Gogh's view of the Seine with lamps, his first one, was really night, with gas lamps on around the harbor and also illuminating the foreground and his easel. That I fancy is the real night picture. When one must work by torchlight and construct the dark with blues, greens and mauve just like one might bash out some regular clouds. In any case we came up with a view of the young wheatfield, just sprouting pea green shoots from the maroon soil, and the dark wall like perimeter which hid the moon until at last we could set it in. The Borg with us all the way!
Look, we must find it within our schedule to furnish you with more of the subject and our intentions. We must do that for you who have been so good for us but also for ourselves in order to continue to work on our socio/political orientation, if one might call it that. Of course we have volunteered for this disorientation by building for ourselves in the first place a world view influenced by years and years of studying, thinking and reading of antiapitalist critical art offerings by seemingly unassailable academics, but also and crucially, by recognizing that that world was under attack and was crumbling. Plenty of certainties dissolved and just as many naivete's were revealed as the post truth era engulfed us. Equally it might have been just as possible to have ignored or not even noticed that the world one inhabits has been bust up good and proper and simply just wait until orthodoxy of some sort returns and an artist can simply pick up ones critical, socially engaged gauntlet from whence it were left and carry on.
Perhaps our circulation is suffering in this posture. Forgive us, we reveal only our lack talking like this. We speak of a particular period of politicization and crisis which happened to coincide with our own journey but that ended in 2011 with a snap. After that we speculate but we are not equipped with the book notion. Ours is really a story of disorientation which may have started with a societal outlook but at some point became very personal. And now we talk to the singularity! So you see, you must now find a younger artist if you want any comment on the state of radical doing. We have drifted.
At sea,
John
1 John's