The state before I roughed up Vodňany 7
I was not happy with the 4th painting in the Vodňany sequence, It did not work as a painting, too many clichéd short cuts and didn’t express the constellation of ideas that I had in mind: Then I started painting again, after a fallow couple of months without using a brush, and it pulled together. In the interim I had been working up the material for a forthcoming sequence but that was also an excuse for the terror of starting work again! It is a better painting now and it tells the correct story back to myself. Now I start on reformatting the 7th painting, which formally was perhaps the best of the sequence but it did not tell me anything. It is now formally lousy but from the mess I should perhaps be able to find a direction.
Schnittke is the composer of the week on Radio 3. I have always found much of his music powerful and perhaps the only polystilistic composer who more or less avoids cheap tricks. (can you call other composers such? In Schnittke it is a principle in others a supermarket view of composing. The only piece of his I listen to consistently is the Concerto for mixed chorus that overwhelmed me at the Union Chapel, Islington. I cannot remember when but I think it was not a lot later than it being written in 1985.
My own language often uses conflicting codes; The Vodnany sequence being a good example of this, but often the different “languages” I invoke can look to an outsider as a change of direction; Please look beneath the labels!
