JANUARY 2024

Monday 1.1.24

It’s always a lovely way to start the year being back in the studio working on the two commissions for Paul in Australia. He is such a wonderful patron. It’s interesting how I have been blessed in life with collectors who become dear friends and supporters.

Tuesday 2.1.24

Continuing  in the same way in the studio, eyeing up some of the stretched canvases which are primed with their frames and ready for me to create paintings on them., thanks to Richard’s organisation.

Wednesday 3.1.24

I’m delighted when the two copies of Mike McKiernon’s book Art and Occupation arrives. He specialised in occupational medicine after graduating eventually becoming chief medical officer at Lucas Industries, a UK health and safety officer and RoSPA. He then completed a masters degree in art history at the Barber Institute of Fine Art.The book is a collection of seventy essays he wrote for the Journal of Occupational Medicine taking a work of art depicting some form of work made over the past two thousand years. My painting Deadline (Morohashi Museum of Modern Art) is used to illustrate one of these.

Monday 8.1.24

On rising, pleased to see there is an e mail from Ben, our accountant, re the painting I’ve bought back in New York. It was originally purchased from the New York dealer Barry Friedman by Yoko Ono’s partner. Ben’s advising on the VAT as part of import duty.

We then set off at about 1pm for Buckland Manor near Broadway and are pleased to arrive before Robert and Toyah who have invited us to lunch here, it being a particular favourite of theirs.  They arrive shortly afterwards ad it’s so good to see them, both looking bright ad elegant, Toyah in a pale pink tailored coat and vibrant green dress, Robert in a greenish grey suit and patterned scarf. Although we have been in communication, we haven’t seen them since Laurence’s opening. It’s wonderful to catch up and we exchange news of what they and we have on this year, all of which is very exciting.

Saturday 13.1.24

It’s Samuel’s birthday today - he’s going to watch Chelsea play a match with Kev and he had five friends over for a sleepover then played football this morning.

Sunday 14.1.24

We drive up to London to celebrate Samuel’s 16th birthday. He wanted a dartboard which he picked out and sent us the link for. We also got him a set of darts that he chose and a fibre surround so that the darts won’t damage the wall or door in his room. Although inspired by Mark Littler who has jus narrowly missed becoming world champion in the final at only 16 yers of age (although he looks much older that 16 years) whereas Samuel looks his age - he’s a very handsome boy. Kev has cooked a sumptuous Thai salmon dish using two sides of salmon. We have such a lovely time as Nathan has come down from Ramsgate with his beautiful dog Bea.

Isaac’s looking very handsome too and looks about as tall as Nathan. Henrietta has managed to buy a wonderful selection of very special cakes this evening and Samuel’s original super-dooper cake had been eagerly eaten up by all those hungry boys. Kev’s really good at fixing Samuel’s new dartboard up in his room so he demonstrates to me his skill and tells me that it’s the triple 20 that is the important one to try and get.  I had always thought it was the bulls eye.

Monday 15.1.24

After lunch with Henrietta we go to see the Philip Guston exhibition at Tate Modern. It’s bitterly cold as we walk from where we parked - I think today was forecast to be the coldest of the year so far. But the exhibition is well worth  it and we follow Guston’s career from surrealist easel paintings to Mexican social murals, teaching and his journey into abstraction where he hung out with other artists like Jackson Pollock and William de Kooning etc. He even had an exhibition of these abstract expressionist works at the Guggenheim. But there was still the emotional pull of the figurative and he questioned how he could get up in the morning disgruntled and complaining about the political state that America was in then go to his easel and wonder whether to replace the blue patch with a red one. Thus his journey into semi abstraction using cartoon-like figures and motifs, drawing on his early years when he did a course on cartooning.

Then we drive north to Islington to have dinner with Martin and Alison Bailey. Martin is the van Gogh expert having written many books on him and is also chief London correspondent for The Art Newspaper.

Monday 22.1.24

Receive e mail from Julian who seems to have taken over from James at FRP Advisory the new administrator for Trinity House’s bankruptcy telling me that there re another three prints at Simon Hall the shippers in storage and that it will cost me £45 each to get them out.   I write back and ask when I might expect to be paid  for my self portrait In The Studio and sculpture Migranti and he cooly returns a reply saying that I will be unlikely to receive payment for them or the painting that never came back from the USA. He says there are sixty artworks that had been sold that Steven Beale had not paid the artist or owner for. When I forward this to Ben, my accountant he says it is disgraceful that they have already taken £600,000 but I guess it is always the individual worker at the end of the line who doesn’t. He says that the director of the gallery is still not co-operating. It’s those little people at the end of the line who lose out, in this case the artists who make the paintings that galleries rely upon.

Monday 29.1.24

Interesting e mil from Martin Bailey who when we had dinner was telling us about when he went to interview Salvador Dali for The Observer. How Dali had become a frail reclusive ascetic who didn’t come out of his bedroom for interviews but passed a piece of paper telling Martin that he once had the privilege of meeting the British Royal family. Martin sent a copy of his article from 1987 which makes fascinating reading.

Ellie comes to see the big painting I bought back from New York which the dealer Barry Friedman had shipped there with several of my other works to show at the Chicago Art Fair and was reproduced in the catalogue. We’d had dinner with Barry in New York we then flew to Toronto for an exhibition I had opening there before flying down to Chicago where my French dealers were also in partnership with  Barry. Greatly surprised that this large painting wasn’t there as he had sold it to Yoko Ono’s partner from the New York galley.

Tuesday 30.1.24

My royalty statement from the Bridgeman Art Library. Very interested to that the Italian newspaper La Repubblicca has reproduced my painting The Writing on the Wall, painted during the Gulf War when the Iraquis were sending scud missiles into Israel and I thought how disturbing it would be for infants to see their parents transformed into these surreal elephantine creatures when they donned their gas masks. I imagine they might have used it in connection with the new dire situation between Israel and Gaza. It’s heartbreaking that it and the Ukraine war are taking place in the 21st century.  One of the other payments is from Leon Arts, the delightful bi-lingual educational books that help children learn through looking at paintings. This time they have used one of my paintings, Toyshop. The third payment is from New York, art.com  It’s a brilliant way of getting the works seen around the world.