I’ve been looking at ‘Quality and Experiment’: the prints of John Piper today. I knew I liked Piper, but now I find that I really want to be making things right now in order to study his work all the more deeply. I really love the combination of colour and markmaking he used- so serious and yet so interesting. He’s the link between the 30’s drawing that was going on in England and a much more European traition that has much more colour and gesture to it. It’s possible to look at Piper again now and see the concerns he reflected through my own, particularly in my Whistling Copse series.

It does make me yearn for a smaller print project so that I could simply dive into the colour and marks without all the planning and sheer quality control that putting together a book-long thing is requiring of me. I must also note to myself that I haven’t moved the process along very much in the last couple of weeks, despite staying busy. It’s really time to start doing the computer work I promised myself I’d do, and to visualize some colour for the project. The Arnolfini fair looms…