Day 52 Wednesday

It has been a really good week in the studio battling it out with my canvas for the Blake prize. I’ve been putting a fair few hours into it, and the audio books from the library keep me entertained while painting away. I just finished the 15 hour unabridged ‘History of England 3000BC-1603AD’ by Simon Schama, which was fantastic. Unlike before, when I would paint to music and get distracted by a good song by Tegan and Sara or Louie Armstrong, drop my brush and get online to look for the tablature – now I get distracted by the potent imagery of the gory history of England and imagine paintings, such as one of Robert the Bruce in Ireland after supplies had run out, digging up and consuming fresh corpses to keep the Scottish army from starving. Or perhaps a painting of the Black Death of the mid 1300’s? There are so many interesting themes for paintings out there, I’d better keep focused on what I’m doing. I’m hoping to have an image of the Blake prize painting up on the blog tomorrow, as I’m taking it to Melbourne on Friday to have framed and shipped to Sydney. For now, I’ll put up a small gouache of a persimmon orchard I did from a video these past few days, and then get back to painting on my Blake entry.