Edges

I live on an edge, in more ways than one. Today I want to talk about an edge defined by London's circular motorway, the M25.

Once upon a time, I lived about 3/4 mile inside the M25 and I painted pictures of the suburbs. Now I live perhaps 300m outside the M25 and I paint the landscape. This photo is my border, where the Thames passes under the motorway between Runnymede and Staines.

To a degree, the difference is simply the type of environment where I spend my time and with which I therefore have a closer relationship. Before I faced towards London, working in Tolworth and Molesey. Now I see London as nothing but a necessary evil and turn my back on it, heading into the woods at every opportunity.

In Alanland, where Alan is King of the Alan people, ideas are never that simple. When I restarted painting last year, before I started painting the countryside I picked up exactly where I'd left off 13 years before by depicting the suburbs. This time it was modified by more than a decade as a shopkeeper but I just wasn't feeling the excitement of before so I turned to my more immediate landscape, Runnymede and the Surrey countryside. This grabbed me in part because I hadn't painted landscapes with serious intent before - it provided new challenges and stretched my vocabulary and I like to make things difficult for myself.

Recently I have looked at the suburban work I started last year with a little distance and it fascinates me, it is intriguing, ambivalent and surprisingly emotional. This raises some questions fundamental to my practice.

Given that as an artist I don't feel that sitting on a fence is an option, what should I think of being on two sides of a fence at the same time? Is to continue with both strands of work to sit on a fence, to dance on it or to repeatedly hurdle it? Should I rigorously close my options down or accept my restless nature and succumb to tangents and whim? How will my decision impact on my ability to focus?

 Perhaps there is a way to unify the two strands in a single body of work, but does this run the risk of being a mish-mash which does neither thing well? Since in many ways they explore the same concerns, using the duality of represented space, the joy of colour and the sensuality of paint as tools for coming to terms with my surroundings, maybe they are in fact exactly the same?

This is why I am reluctant to show my work here, despite teasing it. I am tempted to show both strands, but for the sake of a quiet life show them in different places using different names. Years ago, when both strands first started to manifest themselves in one exhibition, one critic found it hard to accept it was all done by one person. There is no simple answer but deep down I suspect I must show both, show them together and take the questions that go with that on the chin.