16th September 2014

This month my visual diary is made of paintings from our garden.  As with all the other months of the year I set myself a slightly different task based on a personal response to 'being outside':

For this month I am not allowing myself to work from photographs but go out into the garden every day and paint until I have something that I am reasonably happy with.  Once I have made the painting for the day I don't allow myself to change it and, even if I end up hating it, it takes its place in the diary.  If I am away from home all day, I go outside and make a painting in the dark when I get home. Sometimes the paintings take hours and sometimes minutes - I often make several and choose the one I like best for the diary.

I just choose something that catches my attention;  some of the paintings are quite illustrative, some are more painterly and less obviously 'of' something; the whole diary is self-indulgent and playful - by the time I get near the end of a month I am beginning to think about what I'd like to do for the next month.

Each month I print tiny versions of the pictures and make them into books that open out so that all the images can be seen at the same time.

Here are the September images so far (will add more as I do them):