Getting to Grips with the 'endgame'

Over the past few days it has dawned on me that given I shall be away for the next fortnight I am getting perilously close to the beginning of end of this project. On my outline plan...a line here and there on my diary...I am scheduled to complete the photography about now - and the paintings by 24th May. Twenty seven potential working days away! I have now shot many pictures (and have but three locations to complete) and just this week have made a painting (shown here) in a single session. There are now some 60 canvases in train of which some seven are printed digital collages - I expect at the most that three more painted canvases will be added to this group and perhaps five more digital collages created. From the sixty eight works the 45 will emerge. I am now moving a fair way from the original impulses...this work, for instance, draws on a observation made in a local museum...but concerning a quite separate location within the district.

The Packington Wheel

On a superb Spring morning it is a real pleasure to be out and about - in fact the weather is positively Mediterranean and by getting an early start I was able to pull in Packington, Swannington, Hugglescote, Ellistone and Donington Le Heath. The outer reaches of the district (when viewed from the perspective of the 'Northern Parishes') are now covered bar Charley and Bardon. As I drove around I reflected on the fact that although the project was to essentially immerse myself in my own locality as source material for a sequence of images (as opposed to earlier projects that drew upon trips to far off places) I was however in a totally 'other' environment this far south. The area around Coalville is as unknown to me as - for example - the Lunigiana in Italy. One might even suggest I know the area around Aulla better, having spent maybe two dozen or more visits to it. In fact my knowledge of Coalville itself is pretty much restricted to my occasional visits to the Council Offices when I served as a District Councillor in the 1990's. As I walked around Packington on what is my first ever visit to the village I wondered whether I was as much an alien here as I was in Verpiana? The day being as beautiful as it was suggested I might already be in the Lunigiana (where luckily I will be in a week or so)...so much so that a visit to the bank seemed to posit an Italian experience where counter staff seemed so laid back in that southern european manner. All this played out as I drove from location to location with the occasional radio news reports on the tensions in the 'Eurozone' viz. the bail out of Portugal. It's interesting (to me at least) that global economics seem to rest (certainly for Europe) on the vagaries of climate...