Aware of a looming exhibition in September, devoted to still-lifes, I was in my usual New Year blues - devoid of ideas. My 'Starts' had deserted me. These began as a devotion to St. Art, and became my 'Starts' – an idea bank where anything lurks that either grabs my attention visually, or is interesting intellectually. This might be literary or scientific – the latter increasingly less so these days.
The visual Starts have never let me down before, and normally Nature provides all the stimulation I need. Well, it would, wouldn't it, because nature is everything. I rather believe that there is no such thing as a purely 'abstract' painting, in the sense that it has no reference to human experience. Even a work that might loosely be said to be from the “Explosion in a paint factory” school of art obeys certain natural laws. Not understanding laws doesn't mean they don't exist, just that we don't understand them.
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