Painted dogs on this today, a minor modern afternoon. Again boring through thoughts of simple incidents and clouds I could not remember. How to write or paint. Instead of which a sailed galleon cloud of a childhood spent looking up, gestalt tacked across this pedestal sky. Bearing with it meticulous stately considerations of guilty places and pains in memory. A remembering of old Shell song books, one between two. The wooden school valved radio hissing in the big glass light of beeswax classrooms. Playing those self same songbooks with illustrations all around. So the whole school was singing through the beveled glass of sliding doors with the light programme. Written all now in a single soft manner, no need to grapple with the cardboard cut out memories. The monochrome string section sixties attempting forever to fill my gaps. Working with my mind was better as I was told more than once. In a mill, mining town of working with craftsmans hands for someone else this was difficult.

The first time I had to learn the mathematics of numbers, not shapes, but he who never was anything but an amalgam of teachers, played his music instead. His Elgar and his Delius, wonderful and lightly drawn. You must paint your skill with your mind, he said, I think, in my head. You must draw everything until you can draw everything. Then say what you mean to say when you can think in that different, diffident, language. It is not a talent you have, it is a nothing but forgotten skill, plucked at constantly like erased sore pizzicato  fingers. It is the wish inside that keeps us wondering, what if, what was, is somehow? These wonderful, mad voices inside my headaches as they started.

 Not thoughts as the artist, they were more the craftiness displayed in dodging teaching. Avoiding Technical Drawing at all costs. They, who never existing anywhere, like complimentary colour invented, said. Not into God given gifts, they were the practice of short trouser remembering and drawing something later on any waste I could find. Once it was wonderful, like grass shimmers on a Sunday. All was meant to be seen and understood to bring into the sketch book box rooms of my minding.

Some smell of various painted pipe radiators, dome wire cage high lights and institutional colour. Clotted dipping ink and pink blotting.  Archetypal teacher tweed patches in these aformentioned classrooms. Those who did not know, but encouraged anyway. Greasy dandruff haired old men with nicknames and light, meatless diet knowledge with black lumpy mashed foods that were somehow funny and sad at the same time. Rising and falling in gales of hooted laughter and wave cries of subtle studied bullied indifference. Mentoring the mountainous, memorizing the mystery, mannered, mystical methods of these old ones and do it again better. Be certain and play it again. Until you know better, they said, in a whisper before I lost, thinking I did know better. His name was Drawing and it was the skilled use of my eyes, only. This, in fact, I did myself. Put it on the wall for everyone to ignore, deliberately.

So the blown glass grass shimmer and the cumulus grey changing spaceship like waiting of this petty grey rain coming afternoon is for him to understand and me to feel. Drawn in pencil and impasto coloured with wet rambling sprayed remembering.