It was nice to be asked to start the new online version of The Brancaster Chronicles. Paired with sculptor Tim Scott, artists involved will show work online for discussion at two week intervals. I am showing 4 recent paintings and 3 images of ink drawings (one of the images features 8 works on paper). Working on the inks has enabled me to work in a different way from my colour work. There is a dialogue (how could there not be?) but the challenge is a different one: working with tone and contrast. A single spot of ink (or paint) has intrigued me. Can it be a significant element in a work? I can remember the red spot of paint in Matisse’s Egyptian Curtain - an accident surely but he chose to leave it there. There is an inherent “banality” about a spot of ink or paint and I have built upon that to take these spots up in scale to include strips, loops and circles, positive and negative spaces and increasingly long lines which meander throughout the drawing. I call them drawings but really everything made in my work is subject to drawing as I identify drawing as the actual making of a work - the whole endeavour to control my materials. The inks opened up possibilities for me to explore more intriguing notions of space. They also compelled me to be far more forthright in my paint handling , to get more out of the densities , the texture and the opacity of the paint. I have used the term “a bag of facts” to release the fiction (illusion) of the finished work - a counterpoint to artists who look to build their work on narrative, allusion and visual metaphor ( a whole bag of fiction) which ends with a singularity of fact and a trite execution of image - which cannot logically be that important as its merely a vehicle for the information so the most hackneyed approach usually suffices. here’s the link to the online site: branchron.com