Update

I have had a pretty busy summer, but have not spent much time on the computer. I have kept notebooks instead. So what I'll do now is to put in some of these notes, just to get in the swing of blogging, again.

Two Directions
I want to keep up my series of commuter paintings. It's an interesting subject for me, as I have been a commuter. I'm still taking phone pictures of commuters and I like trying to compose pictures from these pictures. Putting together people from different pictures. I have to get a few pictures together for the subject to make sense. So I have finished one picture and have another that is well underway.

I have also been experimenting with collage, particularly painting over photos and parts of the background. Thick paint, impasto in places, thinking hard about light and dark, leaving the background bare. I got some old photographs from an antiques market in Brighton and made a patchwork blanket. I also got interested in everyday print that gets neglected – things like barcodes, age-restriction warnings, health warnings. And I tried to work these up into something.

New York and elsewhere
I went to New York and was struck by a number of things in galleries there that hadn't occurred to me, before. They weren't amazing revelations, but I hadn't thought about them, before. For example, I liked the way that Picasso and Cézanne focused on figures in certain paintings and didn't appear to be too concerned about background. For example, Picasso's Boy Leading a Horse and Cézanne's The Bather.

The compositions are quite similar, the same neutral colours. The backgrounds only giving an impression of light.

I found this, too, in a Turner picture – not in Tate Britain! – in The Frick. The artist working to show the light, not the details. And I wondered if I ought to change my working practice. My paintings are time-consuming and I wonder if it would be better if I relaxed on the background detail, and concentrated instead on the light.

I was still working on the first of my commuter series at the time and it wasn't the right picture to change the approach, but thinking on the subject gave me the idea to experiment with backgrounds in different ways.

In my second painting, on a smaller, thinner canvas, I again pencilled lightly a grid and the outline of the picture. And then I worked up a tonal underlayer with burnt amber, white and burnt sienna.

But when it came to the background, I let the window light spill on the woman and into the background, and placed a ghostly figure through the light. Here is the half-finished picture and then the final piece:

In New York I also came across a number of artists that worked with collage in ways I hadn't really seen before. James Rosenquist's eight colleges in MOMA really got me interested in collages of printed paper, gelatin silver prints, transparent overlays, metal, synthetic polymer paint, ballpoint pen, felt-tip, crayon and masking tape. The wide range of mediums really seemed exciting. Some of the collages focused on compositional structure and the sequence of images. Others incorporated images from magazines. Here's a picture of some of the Rosenquist images in my notebook:

I was also very struck by Eduardo Paolozzi's Dr Dekker's Entrance Hall. A robot from the sixties, or a children's book – and over the top a picture from a book on German tile manufacturers. Paolozzi has said, "What I like to think I'm doing is an extension of radical surrealism". Surrealists liked the idea of the automaton, half-human/half-machine, the confusion between the living and the inanimate that Freud called the Uncanny. What I liked was the way neither image was in colour and yet there were different tones in each picture – and how they appeared to be together as one picture but are in fact from two different sources.

Mary Beth Edelson undermined classic art in a really interesting way. I particularly liked Happy Birthday America and Some Living American Artists. This is a way for collage to challenge perceptions of art and life that works very well.

While in New York I visited a community center in East Harlem where there was an exhibition of the life and gun/gang culture in the Puerto-Rican community. The pictures were shocking – for example, a father showing his baby how to hold a gun, while the young mother looks on, smiling - and I couldn't relate easily to the unsentimental images. The harsh black and white seemed appropriate, suited the atmosphere and darkness of the pictures. It was unglamorous, challenging, and it made me wonder about the role of violence in that community. In addition, I realised how different the way of life in that area was from my life.

One of the galleries I enjoyed most was the Museo el Barrio, a celebration of Puerta Rican art . Many of the pictures from the middle of the last century were figurative, and I wondered if this was an assertion of identity. I walked around the district and saw there was a great deal of street art. I don't mean graffiti, but murals. Many of the murals featured well-known people from the "hood". There was also graffiti, but it was in separate places. And someone explained that the different artists respected one another.

 It occurred to me how important graffiti and murals were to the community. Big Money takes most of the available image space for ads featuring fast food and coke and all kinds of rubbish, and there is no place for people to express themselves. For the urban artists in this area of New York, graffiti was a way of reclaiming their community, of taking control of their lives. It was a question of identity. And that must be an important aspect of art.

But compare the graffiti that's approved of, colourful and positive, from el Barrio, with the section of wall that I saw in Naples, later in the summer. The latter image has a completely different feel. It's angry, political, violent – and has nothing to with a sense of community.

It makes me think the first image is too "pretty". Or rather, it has an impact that is strong on design, but it's basically wallpaper. The second image has more power, because it isn't trying to be attractive, it's people trying to get their messages across by overwriting one another. Somehow, it's also disheartening.