The Artist's Chair

I have been meaning to get out to my cousin's studio for a good while and finally made it this evening, to take a look at his new work (some fantastic stuff: portraits, abstracts, landscapes...).

Not a long visit, but long enough to be amazed as usual at the heavy-duty industry that goes on in this little terrace house in Bray, the little rooms accumulating canvasses, the walls stacked with them, sometimes four or five deep, the oxygen liberally diluted with oil, turps, Linseed..., the spatters and drips and splashes on every surface, the diminishing walking space (no more than a tiny track), the way some part of your clothes (a trouser cuff, a sleeve, your back...) will inevitably pick up an oily smear, a souvenir. But well worth it. The place is packed solid with Pat's sensual, energetic, vivid translations of whatever obsesses him for any given period: newspaper photographs, boggy ditches, sprawls of docklands, still lives of fox skulls, dead birds, furious sprays of flowers... If you oraganised all of it you'd get several high quality shows, and be able to decorate a few (non studio) houses with the remainder. Such dogged work-fever makes me feel even more of a sloth than I am; them must be moss in my fur at this stage.