After a heavy month of drawing - mainly from other art that has caught my attention - I started my year very early this morning. I spend the first hour of a studio session making more drawings; improvised works, usually. I made a fresh start on an existing painting by painting out and reworking the surface to get a foothold for the next session. I also made several revisions to an existing painting (the home page image “Back and First”) which has been nagging at me for over a month now. I purposely avoided touching it, though, preferring to put miles on the clock with my pencil drawings first. This felt like creating a pressure which the paint session was able to release. I have found these pencil drawings an ideal way to get me focused in a much more intense way to the studio work.