Now, this is odd. For years (and years, and years) I've produced paintings in oil and acrylic that looked, at various stages, quite awful - you know the experience too, I trust. You build up a painting in these media, steadily snipping, cutting, refining, adding, until, at the end of the day - or more often week - you have a work that at least doesn't look as though the cat did it in a distracted moment. This has been my experience for most of my painting life. You cringed lest someone should see the painting before it was finished: artfully interposed your body between it and the casual observer; found yourself inevitably stuttering "oh, it's not FINISHED!", as if this ought to be obvious to a moron and that plainly a chrysalis would emerge, in time, from the horrid, pulsating larva before us. I never expected that this would change; granted, watercolour painting caused a change in technique - get that wrong at an early stage and it's the devil's own job to pull it round. But in oil and acrylic, we moved not only from dark to light, but from unbelievably ghastly to tolerable. Or, as I like to say, worth £100 or so of anyone's money. Picture my surprise, therefore, when - twice lately - I've cracked on with a painting and the blessed thing has worked from the outset, to the extent that I see little point in "finishing" it; I've just finished one, a group of trees in an autumn evening, which I was intending to work up in all sorts of ways, adding details galore.... But I don't think it needs them: and not only that, I think I'd probably spoil what I have managed to get if I carried on working at it. This has never happened to me before - what gives? Am I getting "better", whatever that means, or have I just mastered a few technical tricks that weren't in my repertoire before - after 40 odd years, some very odd, I suppose that wouldn't be surprising. Has it, I wonder, happened to anyone else? If so, does it last? Is it mere hubris, pride going before a fall? Or did I just get lucky .... this happens to me so rarely that I find that hard to believe. If it weren't for bad luck, not that I'm one to complain, I wouldn't, as they say, have no luck at all.... Cheques and food parcels to the usual address. My independent blog, which pray visit and add comments, at www.wightpaint.blogspot.com, has a painting just added which didn't work this way at all - it was a picture I hated, which version I also show, and substantially re-painted. Whether it's an improvement or not I'm unsure, but I like to think it's less boring. I may show my recent painting as well, but what if you don't like it as much as I do - what if you think "oh dear; oh the poor old man; what self-deception - and to think he thought this was actually better than what he'd been doing before!" Inspired by this degree of sympathy, you might like to visit www.isleofwightlandscapes.net as well - it contains both a link to my blog AND a Paypal donate button...... Hurry there now, while this charitable impulse I like to think I've inspired in you all fades. Incidentally, a passing thought - just looking at my latest oeuvre, I note that I have not really used my usual desaturated, natural colours and have restricted my palette - I wonder if that's why it's worked with so little struggle....there's only one way to find out: paint it again, using the techniques and palette of yore. Interesting business we're in: what a tragedy that it doesn't pay.....