In Progress: 'City of Glass 36 - (The Force of Chance)'

In progress - 'City of Glass 36 - (The Force of Chance)'  120x100cms

Time to look at this again now the paint is dry. It's not enough but it's exciting. The title came to me in my sleep, or lack of. There is deliberation and control in the selection of colours, the liquidity/consistency of the paint, the placement and concentration of the drips, (to establish the avenues of Manhattan), but how the drips run, how they behave, is down to chance.

The exploration and manipulation of chance is at the core of Paul Auster's story 'City of Glass'* which inspired the series.

This is a beautiful painting, but a drip is a drip and I see connections in the language to the work of Jackson Pollack, Ian Davenport, Bridget Riley. If I choose to take the painting further, it will inevitably go backwards before going forwards, but this decision, this risk, is what painting is about: it there are any questions, any doubts one must take the plunge into the unknown.

*from 'The New York Trilogy'