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Creativity is intoxicating stuff. Anxious to keep my painting momentum going, I thought I'd have a go at a quick sketch, just to keep things moving. For this picture I painted with the surface horizontal as I looked upwards into the mirror. The diffuse tungsten lighting was largely from behind and a bit to the sides and it cast a tangibly warm hue.

Well, a 'quick sketch' turned into an non-stop eight hour session that ended at four o'clock in the morning! Time just evaporated and when I finally put my brushes down I had it in my mind that it was about midnight. No other creative activity that I do seems to induce this timewarping quality quite so much as painting does. Weird and delightful at the same time.

For what it's worth, I'm really pleased with the result and it's great to see something of the freedom and loose, confident mark making that I used to have beginning to make a return. For me, it's certainly the most successful of my three efforts so far.

Interestingly, I'm beginning to think that age has brought a slightly different way of seeing too. I can't put my finger on it but something is different about the way my eye analyses the scene in front of me now then it did years ago.