Today was the fifth and final session of the art summer school I have been at all week. I was pleasantly surprised to see the amount of work I had produced during the week, including a few that I think I’m ready to try out on the walls at home. One of the pictures I have in mind is this one, which I have provisionally entitled And Then I Saw a Dinosaur:

I started that with a blind drawing on Wednesday afternoon and had got as far as putting some bright yellow round the edges:

You might just be able to make out that it is a short staircase with a hand rail running up the middle. I wasn’t sure how to develop it but this afternoon I was in a push to use up some of the paint on my palette. No time to waste and a large brush in my hand, I started blocking out areas (beginning by dulling down that yellow with a thin purple wash) and it struck me that I had a rather dinosaur-ish shape in the centre. Drawing as a way to capture what I saw rather than what I thought I saw and then painting as a way to see what emerges from that.