A year of Poverty, Painting and Food: Twelve years in catering over, my aim is to paint full time. Stu, my other half, is stuck as a chef feeding the x-thousand over an Edinburgh winter. His cooking tips and budgeting are propelling us through the year on a tenner a day, while I paint.. No comparison to Pablo's talent; I have just named my blog after the Paris studio where he suffered the twin purgatory of poverty and artistic ambition on the cusp.. I am emerging!

Sunday, 20 February 2011

Parade for the birth of Bon

Okay, stay with me here... this is about the painting I have essentially finished today on a very quiet day in the Ritchie Collins gallery in Leith, where I spend my Sundays.
This is welcome respite as we are busy setting up a business that will, all things willing, open in early May after an April of renovations, equipment and artists. The company is called Bon Papillon, and we now have all of our 'setting up' business completed; me and Stu can entertain ourselves calling each other 'Director' and looking at our little folder of mysterious papers that may or may not become relevant as the year progresses. Now, Bon Papillon is also a wee guy who appears in my paintings, due to an earlier quote from a college friend about me seeming as if I was 'newly emerged from a narrow cocoon'. That was a while back and I feel as if the line could have applied numerous times in my years, but none more so than now, as we finally break free of the catering industry and set off into the sunset on our own. So... the painting I have been working on is essentially a celebratory picture of the 'emerging' of Bon the butterfly (aka me) into his new and strange world. Previous pictures have alluded to a kind of harem called the 'Joy Garden'; I have invented various characters who live there and so it seemed a natural extension of this to have Bon emerging from the garden alongside some of its stranger inhabitants. The fact that we are about to set up a business in the shade of the Botanic Gardens is yet another serendipity to add to the pile.
The wee guys accompanying Bon on his debut are a mixture of Hieronymous Bosch and Toy Story; quite where they came from in my mind is a worry, but this is them straight from sketch book to canvas in a day, so they must have been living in there somewhere...


The more I look at it, the more I think that I reveal more about myself than I realise in my paintings; certain things have a habit of recurring and the whole feel tends to be very autobiographical. The problem comes in explaining this to a sceptical punter when he enquires politely what it is 'about'. 'Well, its about my emergance from the shadow of a number of opressive forces that have dogged my life for a while, the support of those who are helping me attain this and the motley crew of influences, friends and circumstances that have led me to this historic personal threshold. Not sure about the jigsaw lady.'


Its a puzzle I guess.

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