Correspondence - Chapter 1 - hosta shoots, cats and butterflies
With two weeks in the bag - week 3 continues ...
Weeks 1 and 2 are complete and Week 3 is under-way.
Twelve paintings are complete; five posted to the UK and Switzerland; seven more are being processed for dispatch to participants in U.K, France, Italy, and South Africa.
You may remember from my previous post that each painting is made as a single canvas piece, then cut in half. The left half goes out in the post (the part that “left the studio”), the right half enters The Archive of Selective Memory (TAOSM) here in Sanremo. It’s a simple system—spreading the work out, piece by piece, while accumulating a body of archived work here in Sanremo.
These aren’t just studio works anymore—they’re moving, physically, into different contexts, with the postal system enacting the network.
What’s been interesting is the nature of the observations coming in. They’re not grand statements. They’re small, specific moments, like when Di S. (Purley on Thames) spotted hosta shoots and anticipated a new war against slugs, and Karen D. (Sanremo) planted her first pot of cat grass, anticipating lots of fun with her cats.
My rule is that each painting must be started and finished in the day it’s chosen. This is a lot of fun for me, and isn’t too much of a problem, however a painting inspired by Angela B. (Sanremo), who noticed hundreds of butterflies on a golf course, was almost left unfinished as time ticked by and exhaustion set in. All that patterning - I wasn’t to be beaten. I love a challenge!
Anyway—Week 3 is live. There are still lots of paintings to be made.
If you’re not already part of it, you can still join. And it’s all completely free.
Read about the project and see more of the daily paintings in David Bell : Correspondence - just click on the small green-cream square-like logo below.
