We are nearly three weeks into lockdown with Covid-19 virus. Strange times that play with your head.
I have spent that time producing the final two works for the Tread Softly series, a timely comment on the world as it suddenly finds itself. The Tread Softly series is inspired by the W B Yeats poem, Cloths of Heaven, an ode to hopes and dreams.
Both of these paintings are still works in progress, but are almost there. They are at the stage where I need to work for a few minutes to make a mark, and then wait til they dry, before making a further mark, a process that could take days or weeks.
In the meantime I have been thinking about what I do next. All I know is that my current work seems to be responding to poems, Warnings, by Scottish poet Jenny Josephs, Yeats’ poem, and now what?
My next series will be very much about where I and the world are now. I awoke this morning thinking that it may be Norman MacCraig’s work, Summer Farm, an exploration of the selves, but that didn’t feel right. Then Shakespeare’s Sonnet 14, then Ovid, then Sonnet 75 and a whole host of poems in between. But the work I have come back to is East Coker by T S Eliot, part of his Four Quartets, a book I first encountered during my MA whilst researching Roy Oxlade, which led me to Philip Guston and his work East Coker. I think I might be here for a while.
susanmilleruk 