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Getting work ready for the Art Fair which is on from Thursday 16 February to Saturday 18 February. The series that has been selected is Mura based on the walls of an old farmhouse where I live, which when I arrived had been derelict for about 30 years. I am including two new small paintings together with some work from 2010. As I have continued to paint these wall blemishes I have become more interested in the effects of saturated colour and a particular pigments and less interested in the content - so the later ones have less in the way of marks and peeling paint and are more about the feeling of a patch of wall. Gaston Bachelard in his book The Poetics of Space writes of the house as a 'privileged entity for a phenomenological study of the intimate values of inside space' and goes on to say 'Transcending our memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter, above and beyond all the houses we have dreamed we lived in, can we isolate an intimate, concrete essence that would be a justification of the uncommon value of all of our images of protected intimacy?' These paintings are about attachment, to particular walls, light at a certain time of day and the shade of a colour or pigment with all its associations. The house has a beautiful quality of stillness and containing - it has been here since c.1450 in its earlier parts; I suppose I want to convey something of that stillness and being there with, despite and beyond - its concrete essence - at least having painted them I have come to think that is what I may have been trying to do!  
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