Praeterita

  Boylston Street, Boston, in 1911 (Wikimedia Commons) The image shows Boylston Street in Boston, Massachussetts, in 1911. I stayed on this street in the year 2000, as I was passing through on the way to an artist's residency in Vermont. The vehicles and styles of clothing that you saw then, and now, are different, but the buildings are the same as when I stayed there. I flew in to Boston on Friday, August 25th. I know this because momentous things happened to me in the weeks after that date (and also because I verified the dates via  Google search). The thigns I remember: The glitter of the sun on the Atlantic Ocean as the plane from London wheeled and flew parallel to the shore before descending into Logan Airport. The heat when I stepped out of the taxi on Boylston Street, a main thoroughfare in Boston's Back Bay district where I'd booked a room for the night. The building where the b&b was located: terratotta coloured stone facade, windows eight feet high, stone ste...

 It's the end of week 1 of 2023, and this painting is an example of the new work I've been making since the summer of 2022. Six months ago, I was doing an "at-home residency" as I experimented with finding new material for my art practice. The result was that I went back to my many sketchbooks, which are full of gestural semi-abstract marks, mostly drawn from observing landscape or at least the external world. This canvas is combined from several drawings, supplemented by photos that I use for colour reference. It measures 5 feet x 4 feet, using alizarin crimson and white.