George Bailey: ... and the moonbeams would shoot out of your fingers and your toes and the ends of your hair…

I think I may have already mentioned that painting is hard and that you have to do an awful lot of it to be any good. Last year I managed to paint five paintings in total. How pathetic is that? I also did a little sketching and tried some pastel work but I wasn’t really happy with anything I produced and threw two of the paintings and most of the sketches in the bin.

The paintings were experiments in acrylic and glue. I haven’t worked in acrylic much before and I have to say that I liked the medium but that it didn’t have the same textural quality as oils and I didn’t want to use it like watercolour, hence the glue (and a little sand).

All of the paintings were small. The largest was about thirty inches by eighteen and the smallest about eight inches square. The painting above is one of the smaller ones and actually looks a lot better here than it does on the canvas, perhaps I’ll take my brushes to it again rather than throw it away as I had intended. The problem I have with working small is that I get stuck into the detail and that isn’t what I want at all. For years I’ve been trying to paint and draw landscape that suggests rather than portrays. I know what I want to achieve, it’s just that I can’t seem to achieve it. I’ve come close a couple of times but ultimately it eludes me and I end up with a picture of something rather than something that looks like a picture. At some point in the painting process I think I’m almost there, but then I do a bit more, and then a bit more, and change this, and change that…and before you know it, its gone and I end up with a picture of something all over again.

When will I ever learn to stop?

Perhaps I need to go bigger, I’ve painted big canvasses in the past but even then I seem to end up painting a picture. I have a painting of a stormy day at Hell’s Mouth that is five feet long that everybody thinks is great and that I hate (well most of it, there are some small areas of paint that I like very much). Maybe I should throw away my artist brushes and get some four-inch house painting brushes and a roller. It might free me up to be loose enough not to focus on the damned detail.

They say the devil is in the detail. I think they are right.

I know that it is in me to be able to do this; I just need to set it free. In everything I paint I can find a few inches that I’m completely and totally happy with, a piece of sky or sand, a rock, a shadow on the grass.

The painting above is the view from the road going up Yr Eifl as you look towards Pwllheli done from sketches and memory, no photograph. I call it (very pretentiously) Aspects 4. I like most of the sky, I think I’ve caught the light on the sea okay, I like the reflection of the light on the hill on the left and the texture (glue) of the mountain on the right; but I hate the middle distance, far too green, and why can you see any mountains and fields at all, and why oh why did I paint in those cottages and that cheesey wall in the close foreground? Just because they’re there doesn’t mean they have to be in my picture.

I hate it when I do that.

Okay. I have three five feet canvasses under my bed at home. They have been there nearly six years waiting for me to come and chuck a load of paint at them. Before my birthday in March I’m going to have painted one of them. I don’ know what I’m going to paint, but I’m going to give it a go. I may even just paint without making any sketches; perhaps I’ll just paint the sky or the wind, who knows? But I am going to do it and when it’s done I’ll post a photograph of it here.