Note on the Sunset Paintings (10 January 1998)

After I painted the sunset I felt I should have known better and taken the freedom to paint it more loosely, or at least to change the scale and not paint the same frame over and over. That I could have made it as alive as some of the others, some of the ‘better’ ones.

Yet the ordinariness of [some of] the paintings is part of what they’re about, they’re a series of sketches rather than individual finished worked-out creations, their underlying narrative quality is at least as important as their immediately apparent value as paintings. Their art is partly in their existence – their reality in time. To worry about the aesthetic qualities of any particular one goes against their aesthetic. The repetition of scale and of framing establishes the change in time. Only the time changes, the world is the same template every day, without color, without form, with only the broadest outside outline, the presumed rectangle of vision. What’s happening here is not painting it’s observance. Not observation. Not attempted brilliance. Surrender. It’s a routine interaction – sacred, simple, incomprehensible, implicit, routine – like prayer. Prayer doesn’t reinvent itself every day. Prayer doesn’t perform a backflip. If I do produce something wonderful, I’ll take it. But in this case the work lies somewhere between the image and the subject that inspired it.