Have you put in for any colour yet? If not then I'd like to change the order. The highest quality we can possibly  get even if it means fewer varieties  and you have no doubt guessed that my trip to London has produced a change. After a day closely scrutizing paintings in the national I found myself in somewhat of a daze and as I paused to compose myself I saw that I was right outside of an enormous colour shop. I rather staggared in, I suppose they are used to it being so close to the museum, and asked to be escourted to the oil. I exchanged with a young art student, (timid, thin and somewhat gnarled) as to the range and I was taken aback by the expense of the high end colours - we're talking hundreds of pounds for some varieties. I have always wanted to know specifically what difference the high quality colours have over the student range so I resolved to get some answers. She told me of course that the cheap colours are synthetic and as you go up in price the raw materials are of better quality. I was told also of the improved luminosity of the better colour, nothing new, but then, as I began to vent my frustration at the injustice of the price and the impossibility for the humble painter to afford the high end, another attendant appeared and with a gesture of calm gently relieved me of the £230 tube of cerulean blue I was waving and asked if she could be of assistance. Another student artist I gather - calm, assured and with something to say on the subject that I hadn't considered and which quite changes the situation. She told me that the higher quality paints are more economical. They go further if you will, at a ratio of 20 strokes of the high quality to 1 of the student quality she claimed. I told them that I find that ratio very hard to believe but I can accept the principle and if the ratio is even half accurate then it makes good sense and whats more the good student gave me a little sample tube of the highest quality ultramarine, made by a fellow called Mathew Harding. I'll give it a test and I told her that if it prooves to be anywhere near a 20 stroke to 1 ratio then we would place an order. In any event I asked around the other painters I exchanged with and it seems to be common knowledge that the higher the quality the raw materials equals more value in terms of usage.

So I've learnt something, and would not a prospective buyer be encouraged that the thing has been made well and wont go pink like my view of St John Ambulance Building1. Further more if, in time, one is lucky enough to fetch a fair price for one's work then what would it matter? I know for a fact there are hundereds of worthy and not so worthy painters in Cornwall alone who fetch between £1000 and £5000. But I find it strange discussing money like this. Like so many others I spent years developing a type of art practice that is designed specifically to resist art object status2, in short to be unsaleable. But look here, if its a choice between selling a humble well intended oil and constantly making funding applications with all the desparate panic and deadlines involved, the not knowing if you'll get it and being at the mercy of whatever notions the AHRC deems fundable this year, (not to mention the rule changes that can count you out at a stroke)3 then I'm happy to struggle with the former. But there's more4. Given the crisis and the way people have been thrown to the dogs like they have through the austerity measures I think it essential to aim for a measure of self sufficiency and sustainability in our resistance, especially on an individual level we must as Holmes said recently 'live the model'. Large scale direct action movements, spread out in network a la Occupy, is surely the best way, either as organiser or participant when they occur, and those in a position to do so would do well to follow up with what old Holmes' said about 'eventwork'5. But to my mind it is increasingly essential to press on with the task of radicalising the more humble everyday human persuits, be it painting pictures or carving wooden spoons, and that doesn'y6 have to mean capitulation, not if a political narrative is weaved in.

Could we even have a political business? Might it even be effective? Is it too far to suggest that in an amazing post-world-crisis twist, a good plein air oil may function as trojan horse for anticapitalist politics? Didn't Adorno say that after Auswitz it is no longer possible to find beauty in a diminished chord? Well I'm suggesting that after 2011 we would do well to rediscover how and to our political ends to boot! The way I make it out is that the idea is about recieving rather than doing, I mean doing is no garuntee. The entire logic of participatory practices is of course weighted in favour of 'doing' which is all right, it can work well but there is no need to count out seeing and thinking. Being of intellectual bent isnt enough either. There are plenty of people that know whats going on, the university's are full to the brim with these folk but they are paralysed by their own positions. Equally there are plenty of intellectual people who are not political, in any case I feel that there is more to do as regards the viewers imaginary experience. There are frameworks to understand all creative doing as resistant in essence, young Sholette's Dark Matter7 see's it thus and the excellent Holloway8 too, but these ideas emphasise the doers, and let us not forget the most interesting of all; the verb processes found in jazz derived improvisation9. This is all to the good but I'm thinking more about the potential of works to again carry political meaning for the dignified viewer, to perhaps create an emancipatory imaginary experience from a work. Can it be so? We need more about the politics of doing but as spectators, something like but much more than Ranciere's 'emancipated spectators'. The way he has it leaves things rather too much to chance for me10. Why not take up the gauntlet? I'm not talking Gurenica at the UN (subject+context=meaning) but the still life above the mantlepiece. No idea necessarily, no subversion, just a way of making it possible to understanding the thing on its own already as political (as that stubborn old blowhard Childish11 put it years ago..."the idea is painting").

Forgive me for becoming so abstract, if only to be as clear sighted as Van Gogh seems in his letters. One just takes in so much information these days which comes in snippits and circles the mind like crisp packets in the wind. A piece of opinion here, a radical insight there and a whole lot of ranting and raving which nonetheless contains memorable ideas. What would he make of it? What would he be doing if he were alive today? A funded fine art PhD I would say, (have you seen the line where he anticipates the public funding of art?)12 but would he be a painter? Almost certainly not. But whatever he did do I have no doubt he'd make full use of todays social media inventions, and can you imagine Van Gogh's twitter feed? What would become of Theo? Some sort of amalgamation between Charles Saatchi and Charles Esche I fancy.13 I would like to talk more about the brothers Van Gogh and their place in the art world in 1888. That biography has a wonderful chapter about Paris that we must discuss but not now as Jeff14 is coming over to adjust the pressure setting on my boiler. The smoke must burn the colour of a newly elected pope apparently.

Adieu for now....

------------------John