I was trying to get my painting muscles going again as I haven't painted anything in months and tried my hand at this still life. It looks much larger in the photo but it is only A4. I also wanted to share another passage from Mervyn Levy's book, which I felt was pertinent -
Humanity is notoriously indolent and to effect change, inevitably requires effort, such effort as only the relatively few enlightened ones are prepared to make: at least initially. Enlightenment in itself is not the prerogative of the few: it is the lodestar which all may follow who are prepared to practise the arts of criticism and analysis. Every convention should be periodically subjected to the most searching scrutiny and when it is found wanting, it should be jettisoned. Yet...few people are willing to effect change, or even to question the nature or the validity of the existing status quo. Until the reader has purged his mind of existing prejudices and preconceptions, until he has liberated his intellect from the chains of those constricting thought patterns that precondition and so limit...the possibilities of (in this case) painting.
At present, how many of us enter adulthood equipped to think, to feel, or even to see creatively. We live by proxy, taking on trust conception and ideologies, systems of thought and of action, in whatever the field, that are founded, not upon our own unique experiences but upon those that come to us at least second-hand.
