So I wander into the studio yesterday, that is to say the day before I start my formal teaching this week - monday is my painting day, so I can be as selfish with my time as I like. I have a few paintings on the go , but right now my studio is dominated by two large canvases - about 2x 1m which I've been toying with for a few months. The problem is both are fairly good, but lack the verve of my smaller stuff; it's just a question of scale, as a gestural swipe of the knife on an 9" board is a different thing altogether on a 2m canvas. I muck about with these two canvases for a few hours - glazing here, scumbloing there,but I realised by mid afternoon that I'd reached the crunch point as I call it; the bity where I need to 'break' the painting to turn it from something safe and predictible to something more edgy and evocative. This involved a paintes kettle full of glaze, lots of rags, and a painting knife from the cookshop (my trusty 6 inch icing knife) and splashes everywhere. As soon as the pictures became more random, they became more alive, more evocative, in short more in the mind - less on the canvas. This is scary stuff ehen applied to a few months (albeit fitful) work, but if Old Masters such as Velasquez, Rembrandt or Turner taught us anything it was about the power of suggestion over resolution. I understand that many of the Old Masters advocated this by exploring the suggestive power of random marks. Da vinci wrote of the 'stains on the wal, 'ashes in the fire' and so forth being stimulants tpo the painter's imagination. I know Goya kept a piece of ivory upon which he would drop black ink in the hope of making little scenes. The famous variagated marbles of Florence were known as 'landscapes of the imagination'. A passage in 'the Glasgow Boys' caught my eye today, it speaks of Macgregor realising that to paint fully one has to 'paint effects, not facts'. The more I paint the more inclined to think this is the central truth in painting.