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| Self-portrait with colour 24"×20", Oil on canvas, December 2012 |
First of all, this one will be the only blog from now on and into indefinite future; splitting myself and my thoughts into different streams neither works nor fits, and being multi-platform is distracting and inefficient. Since my Tumblr blog has been more or less dormant for a long time, this decision concerns mainly my "Sonnets in colour" blog: all posts about sonnets will be integrated into this blog (in fact, the first Shakespeare post is already here). After all, this series is, for the foreseeable future, the core of my work and my thinking, so it seems a bit weird to keep it away from a separate "Studio news" blog.
- I will be gradually moving the earlier background stories for the "Shakespeare in colour" blog to my website for easier browsing; and when this task is complete, that blog will disappear from the face of the internet, and the newer stories will appear here (and then on the website, too). To sum up, Shakespeare, his sonnets, and "Sonnets in colour" will be one of of the weekly categories on this blog.
- Another, (at least) weekly category will be directly linked to my +In Studio with Masters Google+ page, which has been temporarily abandoned after our autumn with Marc Chagall, which is quite wrong. In other words, there will be posts about the history and the internal workings of painting & paintings. For the time being, the overall topic wouldn't be any individual master and his work, but rather an exploration of connections between different great painters, about the ongoing conversation-in-paintings across time and space, with quotes, responses, stylistic influences and what not.
- The third weekly category I have in mind is called "Reading log", as a working title. It won't be just any reading, of course: it will also be about painting (and art in general). Since this is a single life (mine, that is), and so, when all is said and done, one journey, this category is likely to be thematically linked, at least loosely, to the previous two; but not necessarily, and not necessarily in a direct and obvious way. It might not even be necessarily about books; but also about art-related documentaries, new exhibitions, etc.
An attentive and interested reader of this blog might ask, at this point (or at least I hope so): and what about your own work, then, what about "studio news"? But that's precisely the point of this reorganization; or maybe two, slightly different, points. The first one is that the idea of talking (let alone writing) about oneself all the time seems both incredibly boring and slightly indecent. It inspires narcissistic self-centeredness, which is a real danger for a painter anyway, but add the idea of keeping a blog -- and the danger becomes more real than ever. The second is that this is, actually, my life in painting: in studio with masters, with a book in my lap, with Shakespeare on my mind. This is my environment, my native shore, my life and my love; so, when all is said and done, it is still about my work, isn't it? If there is a contradiction between these two points, I will have to live with it for now.
- But still, I am a painter; and my own paintings, their joys and their struggles, are an essential part of my thinking about art, of my engagement with paintings of others and with books. So there will be the last, fourth, weekly category ("Studio news") which will, hopefully, tie it all together, at least for myself.
That's, roughly, my plan for now: old-fashioned about writing and editing as I am, four posts weekly will easily keep me writing daily, and I hope to become better at it with practice. I have no doubt that the concept is likely to evolve and modify itself in the future, but that's it for the present. In the next few days, I will be adjusting the blog's look-and-feel to its new concept; in the meanwhile, stay tuned (and tell me what you think, here or on Google+).
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