Well, I've been painting for years. I just started doing a lot more in the last couple.
There is no progress in art.
The process of art evolving is always one which has fascinated me.
Our art culture makes no attempt to search the past for precedents, but transforms the entire past into a sequence of provisional responses to a problem that remains intact.
Art comes from art: I remember going to the Matisse show and seeing how Matisse had taken one of his own paintings, worked from it and transformed it, and that had led on to the next one and the next.
Every painting I do is related to the last one: it may be a continuation of a previous painting or it may be a reaction against it.
In music, as I find myself forever saying, things don't get better or worse: they evolve and transform themselves.
Sometimes I start in a very realistic fashion, and as I go on from one painting to another of the same kind, it becomes simplified until it can be nothing but abstraction.
One can rightly speak of an evolution in plastic art. It is of the greatest importance to note this fact, for it reveals the true way of art - the only path along which we can advance.
Art is a continuum.
The canvas you are working on modifies the previous ones in an unending, baffling chain which never seems to finish. What sympathy is demanded of the viewer? He is asked to 'see' the future links.
