Some days you eat the bear ...

... and some days the bear eats you.

Arrived at the Art Club yesterday to be greeted by a doleful Prospective Buyer. The Prospective Buyer's Wife had failed to come up with the necessary enthusiasm for buying my Wobbly Bridge picture. I put it in a bag and brought it home.

After a few hours of energetic painting, I realised that all was not well with my Old Gadgie and Buildings picture. In fact, I had to acknowledge that it was never going to work. I painted over it with the remaining paint from the palette.

Across the Wobbly Bridge

Millennium Bridge (Oil on canvas, 16 x 16 ins)

I guess that about does it. Like every picture, there are always touches and tickles that need to be done after a short while (for instance I want to take down the brightness of the St George's crest), but basically I'm done with this. The Prospective Buyer is going to bring his wife into the studio to have a look at it.

I felt like I was on a roll yesterday. I've not felt that way for some time and I think this may, in part, be put down to the pressure of getting things - expected things, done in an expected way - completed on time. One of the inevitable problems of having to earn a crust, I suppose.

Anyway, having put the Wobbly Bridge to bed, I pulled out a little landscape I've been performing surgery on. I made this landscape for a show a couple of years ago and ever since I've been unhappy with it. It showed a grassy foreground with a typically dark ploughed Scottish field beyond, and misty hills disappearing into a foggy sky. The hills and sky didn't convince me at all.

As an experiment, I thought I'd replace them with a sky I'd photographed from the window of Stately Zip Mansion. The initial knocking in was promising and the field, because of the change in surrounding colouration, took on the aspect of water. Yesterday I let myself go with the paint (mixed with Spectrum Matt Spectragel) and had fun producing this:

It needs a bit more work, especially at the point where hills and clouds meet, but I think this one will work out. As my Old Tutor used to say, "Do ten more!"

My last bit of work - more thinking than painting - was to try out a possible rescue of another painting gone out of favour with its creator.

One of the realisations I've come to in the past few weeks is that I have to break out of the topographically-inspired work I've been working away at ...well, more or less since I began painting. It's limiting my ability to show elsewhere. Although I feel the paintings I produce should be appreciated for themselves, I find that the punters want to recognise the place. I don't much care about the place; it's the painting, the composition, how it's painted, the texture etc, that makes it for me.

Following the punters' likes and dislikes has led me into Bad Ways. There are only so many places in NewcastleGateshead that people are interested in as places to be painted and I'm bored with them. I started a series of other places to try to make them of interest to the public, but to be honest, my heart's not in them. So I decided to Cease and Desist.

The one below is one I started and abandoned as part of the Cease & Desist project.. What I'm trying out here is an experiment to see if I might finally get into some of the figure painting I've talked about before. Yes, I know the figure is a cartoon; in fact he's appeared here before shortly after I met him. Doesn't bother me. I recorded him as a cartoon because it was the quickest way I knew to get him down after I'd got home, but also because he was, in himself, pretty much a caricature anyway.

Not only do I have to decide whether to proceed with this next week, but I also have to decide before then on his scale against the background. There are three possibilities:

I'd be interested in your views, even if I reserve the right to ignore them in a cavalier fashion.

Wobbly Bridge; 4th Pass

For anyone still following this apparently never-ending saga, here's the state of play after today's session down at the Art Club.

I wasn't able to get as much done as I'd hoped. I have to hand in two pictures tomorrow to a small exhibition organised by the Art Club. Most of my pictures are mirror-plated, but these have to be strung. I could find no D-rings anywhere round the house, so before I went to the Club today I had to scour the hardware shops - few and far between in these days of out-of-town shopping - looking for some.

When I got to the Art Club, of course, I discovered they keep a supply of D-rings in the cupboard.

I'm still not convinced by the awkward ribs at either side of the bridge, but the paving has been lightened and warmed up, which throws the figures more onto centre stage and draws the eye away from the peripheries of the bridge.

"You'll have to grade the tone of the paving, " said Plastic Man, "so that it recedes properly.".

"I can do anything I like with it," I said. "It's my picture and there's no reason why it should obey any laws but mine. You should welcome this rare example of Japanese-style flatness in my work."

"You're absolutely right," said Plastic Man.

I'll work on those ribs more next week. I'm confident I can get them to pull themselves into shape and the Prospective Buyer (did I mention there is a Prospective Buyer?) is pleased with the way it's going.

More Wobbly Bridge

I've reached the slow, painstaking part of this picture. I'm not sure whether the photographs will show the differences between last week's state and what the picture looks like now, but using quite small brushes, I've painted in the top edges of the ribs of the bridge and have started to develop the figures.

A family group have pushed themselves into the space between the foreground figures and those crowding towards the back end of the bridge, linking the groups.

Some of the figures have turned around and are now walking back towards the viewer.

I've knocked back the red building by glazing over with a rather loose mixture of ultramarine blue and viridian. The medium I'm using at the moment is Daler-Rowney Alkyd Flow Medium. I bought it because the shop had no bottles of Winsor & Newton Liquin, my usual medium. I quite like the new one; it's more viscous than the Liquin, and "sets up" quicker, becoming thicker and stickier as the session goes on.

I found it easier to get work done at the Club this week. There was still the usual round of banter, but it's easy to establish a routine which takes account of the occasional break. People are sensitive enough to realise when you're working and don't really want to be disturbed, especially if you say, "Bugger off, I'm working and don't want to be disturbed."

I'm happy with the way this painting is going, but I'll be happier when it's done. There won't be too much more. The rib arrangement at the right needs dealing with, and some of those on the left aren't finished. After that, a little more tweaking of the figures and a rebalancing of the tones here and there and it'll be time to call it complete.

Wobbly Bridge

Settling in to a new work space isn't easy.

I lugged my gear along to the Art Club today and piled it into my ducket - my fears were unfounded, my name on the piece of masking tape still there for all to see.

There were cries all round of "Mr Zip!" except of course they don't know I'm Mr Zip so they used another name entirely. There was a short period of good-natured banter and then I was urged to sit down with a cup of coffee and eat my lunch.

Eventually, I started to get things sorted out. I hauled an easel over to a handy spot next to The Salesman. I haven't seen The Salesman in at least six months and as he was just about finished what he was working on, we had to go through the Catching Up conversation. A necessity which I didn't resent, but I was itching to get on with some work.

"You'll find, " said The Mad Doctor, "that towards mid-afternoon a lot of people are packing up for the day, so they like to come and look at your work and talk; yes, definitely talk. You won't get anything done until they've all gone home."

Eventually things calmed down again and I was able to get my canvas on the easel. I'd decided to bring along a picture I started a little under a year ago, in the hope I'd be able to resuscitate it. It's a picture of one end of the Millennium Bridge - the "Wobbly" Bridge - seen from the window of Tate Modern, and this is how it looked at the beginning of today's session.

For a long time now, I've wondered whether I might have bitten off more than I could chew. A gallery owner once said to me, "You do like making life difficult for yourself, don't you?" And it's true; for some reason I'm drawn to complicated problem subjects. And the difficult problem area in this picture is, of course, all those bloody ribs on each side of the bridge.

I was attracted by the scatterings of people and didn't honestly think about the ribs when I started the painting, but now was the time to try to make something of them. Some time ago, I'd pencilled in the divisions between the ribs and now I needed to get some paint on them, to see how they might shape up.

As it happens, it went quite well. I did a lot of huffing and puffing - which The Mad Doctor found most amusing - but overall I'm quite pleased with the way it's going.

Sometimes I find that there's a kind of mental log jam builds up and it becomes very difficult to get things moving again. Just doing something different can be enough to get those mental logs to shift. Even though I probably won't be able to do more to this painting until next Thursday, I feel today's efforts should get me painting again in my own studio.