Recently my website has attracted more traffic from China than elsewhere.
To draw any kind of conclusion is fraught.
Certainly I doubt my ‘Blackboards’ and a Chinese sensibility overlap.
I did my last ‘Blackboard’ last night. I was invited to make a work at ‘Ciao Thyme’, to help celebrate the Balmain Street Festival on this week-end.
‘Something festive’ was the brief.
Balmain Festival Blackboard
Sometimes a brief is restraining. Sometimes it is liberating.
Where two ‘Uniques’ worked side by side in the earlier blackboard (August 21, 2025) to make the best use of the given space, this new ‘starburst’ takes that further by making the separated ‘canvasses’ a unified work.
Unity is harder to achieve when the space is divided.
That at any time a figure might emerge between the two panels creates more tension.
How can the promise of stillness be found suddenly such a lie?
A figure cannot bounce onto the stage of art because art never has a stage.