Enter the Sixth Land
Enter the Sixth Land, gouache on paper, 1991
This painting is called Enter the Sixth Land. It is some kind of portal to the place I've described here. I painted it in 1991 during a very fruitful period when I was living a lonely life in a bedsit in Westbourne Park.
I was exhibiting in galleries in London and selling almost everything. This was good but also challenging as I couldn't keep up with demand and as a young artist I was not making enough from sales to cover my living expenses.
There was a watershed moment when I was invited to show my portfolio to an art dealer at a swanky gallery in Knightsbridge, and he told me directly that although he wanted to exhibit my work in a show that opened in two weeks time, none of what I showed him pleased him and he rejected it all. I was deeply disheartened but also somewhat relieved that the pressure was off. I could step back and spend time getting the work back to where I knew it needed to be.
The truth is, I wasn't brave enough to give up my part-time job as a new car delivery driver for Ford and completely devote myself to painting*. I was feeling burned out trying to produce enough while maintaining the integrity of the work.
Then, a lot of other stuff seemed to happen; relationships, travel, injuries, mortgages and a full-time job to pay for it all and I was being dragged further and further away from my paintings.
There is a continuum close by where I continued to paint and develop my work, sell, and build my reputation, and my life maybe is very different there.
But in this continuum, I didn't care about my reputation as an artist and I didn't want to be churning out work to sell and I didn't devote myself fully to art. That's just the way it is.
*This was a great job. Everyday, I would be given a different new car which I had to deliver somewhere, usually another town, and often quite far away, and then I had to get back home. I've taken cars to Cornwall, and a town north of Glasgow. I've pretty much visited every major city and town in the country, if only just for a few hours. If there wasn't a car to bring back, I'd take the train home, and effectively be paid for reading or gazing out of the window, and every time, I would have been somewhere new. These journeys, these glimpses of other places and other histories and other lives fed my imagination and went into a lot of the painting I was doing at the time.
