'3 days in DC'
3 days in DC
Back in the fall of 2021, and immediately following the
restoration of flights between the UK and the US, I made a flash visit to DC to
discuss options for a new project with Susan and the team at CFAC. We agreed
dates and I spent the rest of the visit sipping coffee and scribbling aimlessly
in a notebook.
It’s normal for me to be working on 10-20 paintings at any
one time, all in various stages of development. I prefer to have them all
around me and move from one to another. Some reach completion with relative
speed and some take longer - years perhaps - and a few never make it that far.
For this project, that reliable ‘conveyor belt’ was paused,
all unfinished work parked to one side of the studio and replaced by a set of
anxious blank canvasses. Progress on such a broad front felt painfully slow and
for too long, there seemed little to show for the effort. On several occasions,
I almost contacted Susan to suggest a postponement of the exhibition and to be
honest I’m not sure why I didn’t follow through on that resolve….
Unannounced, one of the paintings just popped its head
through the clouds and felt ‘finished’; the project was back on again !
Although I would eventually come to re-work that same painting, it proved to be
the catalyst that unlocked the problem.
For a painter, to see a body of your own work on a wall is
an absolute privilege. Its only then can you see and fully understand where
each image has come from and why it represents what it does in the context of
the other work around it. All of the work in this exhibition has common ground
in three days in DC.
Colin Taylor
March 2022