My original idea was of a long canvas and a lot of bison; a huge herd of the beasts, but in the process of contriving the composition and making the drawing the idea altered.
I wanted to be able to see each of the objects, so each bison needed some space. Then I found that I couldn’t push the edges as far as I had hoped; the distortion became too pronounced on the right and the left and so my composition had to be less wide and I lost a couple of bison.
One of my bison was originally raised on a box as if it was an outcrop of rock but I got rid of the box. I also exchanged the bright green vertical of a cactus for a smaller grey dead tree, that was, in turn, edited out. I have eventually taken out everything that interfered with a gentle current, the pattern or the movement of the bison across the canvas and through the composition and I am still paring down the composition and the colour to what seems essential.
I have drawn the bison as accurately as I can. They are identical objects but they are each seen from a different angle. The other relief is that there are two different coloured manes on the bison, that I can twist their tails around and raise or lower the heads.
I’ve been thinking of this painting of Bison along my shelf as a piece of music. I watched a couple of documentaries over Christmas and one was about Keith Richards. He was filmed in the studio playing guitar with other musicians and it seemed that he might be doing something similar to what I ought to be doing.
I’ve a drawing, a composition that are insistent but I can play down elements in the composition, quieten areas on the canvas if I need to or strengthen parts, even empty areas, by allowing my paintwork to become visible.

I wrote above ‘what I ought to be doing’. I’ve not been painting well. I fear that my method is holding me too tight, that I’m not managing to play loosely enough with paint within the precision and rigour of the drawing and the composition. Am I just playing the tune without allowing emotion in ? Am I plodding along like the bison, working so little in this pit of winter that I never get under the surface ?

The canvas doesn’t look like this photograph now, it is chaos and discord and there’s paint everywhere but I didn’t do much yesterday and I haven’t painted today so the canvas is almost dry. I hope the paint will be dry enough so that I can take the canvas off the stretcher. I want to move the whole composition down a centimetre on the stretcher. Now that I’m establishing areas of tones in the composition I feel that there is too much space under the shelf and I want to feel that I’m looking down onto the shelf.