Diversionary tactics

In trying to complete a task I'm a terrible prevaricator - added to which a variety of other pressures to get things done - and the project that has to be completed and handed in exactly two weeks today is still a way off.  I'm shooting more subjects this week...and trying to set up several more for next.  Leaving a few days to make the prints and the final selection...oh, and the small matter of an essay that still consists of 70% unedited notes.

Ah well...best not to worry or panic.  The materials for printing and submitting are now to hand.  There is at the least some clarity in the conception of the pictures and if I could just settle to it the essay should be relatively straightforward.  Though goodness knows what feedback I'll receive from the really rough draft I submitted last week.

So why was I in the painting studio this past Friday, Saturday, Sunday?  Because I needed to distance myself from the other - as well as complete the move from my previous space within the studio complex to the larger space I now inhabit.  I tend to work on a number of parallel themes/projects simultaneously and moving across allows me to do this more easily.  One project is a series of roughly 50x40 cms paintings on panels - entitled the 'Ivanhoe' series and each image (though they are entirely non-referential) named after a town/village/hamlet in North West Leicestershire - which used to style itself 'Ivanhoe Country' for tourism purposes!  This body of work had stalled in around 2006 when I had a period of enforced inactivity due to heart surgery and its only been this past weekend I've been able to stretch out and start work on these pictures again.  This one is no. 14 in the series (and its a bit weird that the project stalled at 13 images if you like that sort of coincidence!) - which place it will be named after is yet to be decided...