'City of Glass 16- (Private Eye)' 200 x 100 cms

It's exciting when everything comes together and a solution is found from both within the painting and from outside.  I have in front of me something that surprises me, something I cannot yet fully explain or understand but feels right and complete. I sat in my chair, looking at the painting, thinking of tinkering with the concentric circles at the top, and worried that by strengthening them, making them more like an image of an eye, I would draw attention away from the intersection of the canvases. All sorts of thought appeared simultaneously: I thought of crosshairs and targets and how in the novel, there is a strong possibility that Quinn is a target, a set-up, a victim in a fiendish experiment, that ends in the apartment on E69St. I thought of Georgia O' Keeffe's fantastic 'New York Street with Moon' that I found doing research for the recent 'circle' workshop in Canterbury.  So that is all I did- I drew the large concentric circles centred on the main axis, with  brush, nail, and string, representing both the eye and a target and within the painting, creating focus and strangeness and although faint, the perfection of the circle, pushes the map-shape of Manhattan, already fragmented, further into the background. And of course there is the visual link with Columbus Circle and the circles at the top.

I am going to continue with the idea of 'building' tower-shaped canvases, 'a tower that is there but not there'.  In this piece, the tower can be considered 'unsolid', transparent, made of glass.......

'New York Street with Moon'  Georgia O'Keeffe