Glazing


                       
Alizarin Crimson.
Indian Yellow.
The colours in tubes squeezed fatly onto paper,
the texture of soft butter,
the smell of woody linseed.

How good
to be sitting here today,
plastic taped to the carpets
and set out, around the studio, vignettes.
Over here autumnal squash and conkers,
over here silks and Buddha’s head,
on the walls paintings in different stages of finish.

Bean tins of beautifully kept brushes,
neat boxes of colours and sets of brush-wash pots.
Everywhere order, stacks of canvases, a tidy mind.

Thalto green – tint strength high.
Raw Sienna – medium transparency.
Thoughts applied to images
like the stripes of coloured glazes.
Yellow for greed.
Red for anger.
Blue for down.
Green is nothing.
Burnt sienna for Bronze light, good and getting better.
I apply stripes of transparent colour to previously painted images
from the ‘Room’ series.
My studio
my arena of work.
The place I work in and the subject of my current work.
Till now executed in black and white monochrome.

Fourteen canvases and boards
all black and white, depicting ‘Room’.
My Father’s study.

Yes he’s dead.
Yes I’m still working on getting over it.
Yes it’s still about this,
It’s all about this and me
and me
and this fact.
This boulder.
This pit.
This invisible stumbling block.

These glazes over-layering ‘Room’ change it.
With their beautiful, transparent, shiny lacquer layers.
They metamorphose the past.
They are present to the colours,
the ‘Room’ is transforming.

 Rainbow prisms overlay images and lifts them.
The lines of perspective extend to Venus,
the light bends as it passes the sun.
It splits and bends, overlays, double images,
and split white-light mixes to perform a dance.

A shooting star
through the midst of the room.
And my world is expanded
looped
and Mobius stripped.

Nothing will ever be the same,
the colours have changed
and are continuing to change.


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