So new year, and I'm up early - helping my wife to go back to work, but also to get a painting I started yesterday into shape.

January is a weird month - full of resolutions made and forgotten, of good intentions that get lost in the fog of the everyday, and mainly full of pronouncement that are noble, grand and by and large empty. So here I go - don't hold me to this though. 

Morning light is uplifting - hinting at spring with the clearness of the blue, picking out any green in the verges and mostly blowing out the fug of the indoors wherein we hibernate for the holidays; so instead of going back to bed I attacked the painting I'd forced myself to start yesterday (as a way of ensuring I got myself back in a routine). 

I'd managed to sketch it out, and I was hopeful until I began the blocking in of the colour. Slowly the sketch was transformed to vague blotches of colour and my spirits sunk - this one is not going to work. I kept going, improving the mess with the build up of more complex colouring, but still falling short of what I'd envisioned. 

With my frustration growing - and this travelling to my hand, I took time off from the piece and put my head in a book, watched some TV, and stopped Looking for a bit. Then I glanced back and got a wake up call - what I saw didn't please me, but it had some potential - the composition seemed to work. 

That potential got and kept me out of bed - now I wanted to see the painting through, to tame it and find the image in my head. It's not complete yet - still scruffy in line and simplistic in the depth of colour; but by the end of the session - blending, filling and starting to pick out the final lines, I now get a sense of the energy and calamity that I want to capture - as well as the a absurdity and chaos of the world that is the core of my world view!

Maybe it's the work, maybe it's the light, but the result is I feel nourished for the new year (Just as well cos' my trousers were tight this morning, which suggests I have to go easy on the food and drink for a bit - holiday weight and all that.) The upshot is I feel inspired - this is the time to get those ideas out of my head, and out into the world.