Melting pot

Constantly fascinated by the way in which influences from years before or yesterday find themselves amalgamated into my art. Talking last week about how interesting it is when other people are viewing paintings and come out with suggested influences (or plagarisms depending how friendly the conversation is) and made a mental note to start recording these suggestions. Last year on Arran I had the strange and often not wonderful experience of working in a restaurant with my pictures on the wall, but with no obvious connection from them to me. Thus I would be serving a table who, for example, were coming out with obscure comments like

'What is that? A shark?'

'Dunno, but those look like billiard balls'

'Yeah, and the dog's running from the shark..'

It was a beach, a dog (hurray), an island and some rocks; I thought that one was literal verging on the cartoon. Others were accused of being about global warming or just proclaimed as crap. Made me a bit less sensitive I guess; happily I also sold some, one of which went to hang alongside a Banksy. Funnily enough the people who bought it didn't have a discussion about what it was 'supposed to be'. (Is there any other phrase more annoying?)

Today someone likened some of my folkyisms to Tore Jansson, who I share the double ss with and I hadn't thought about for many a long year; she created and illustrated memorably the Moomin family, which was familiar bedtime reading in my childhood. So; have the echoes of Moomin mama and papa reverberated through into my present work? I think so; there seems to be a kind of random visual library up there influences and colours the visual creations of today. I looked up the Moomins on Google and the memories I had of some drawings was extremely vivid despite a gap of some thirty years; things I had long forgotten in my conscious mind are still alive and well and no doubt translating themselves into my drawings.

It puts a different slant on plagarism as well.

Another very strong image memory for me has always been Paula Rego, whose paintings I love with a passion and have seen in fragments over the years, but the only book I had was lost a few years ago. Today I was delivered a new one from Amazon as a pat on the back for selling the elephant painting and it is going to be well thumbed. The old book I had probably only went up to about 1990 so this is far more recent and finishes the story for me; it is like finding the missing later chapters of a book long lost.

Doing some postcard sized paintings for a charity show in October tonight and went to check the dates, specs. etc from the original letter; found that one of the senders is June Carey, whose work I admire greatly and whom I have been trying to befriend on Facebook. Hopefully I will meet up with her one of these days as I would love to hear what lies behind her wonderfully monumental figures; in a way in a similar vein to Rego - solidity and sculptural monumentality.

Rego's figures also echo the thoughts of yesterday as she depicts figures in narrative scenes suggesting mental illness and institutionalisation; very, very strong images that are now no doubt adding themselves to my mental library.