Marsyas response

The idea sounds very interesting Tom but i'm concerned you're over thinking things at such an early stage. they may be too specified for their own good, you should just get on with it and if the painting decides to change or seems to want to go somewhere else then let it, its a mistake to think the title should be marsyas and then work from that, particularly with how i see the making of the painting going, regarding your description of it. i also think its going to be really difficult to articulate the idea successfully, it may be a long hard journey to find those elusive tones and colours which speak accurately of the emotional centre to the idea. i find this one of the trickiest parts of painting and its probably why my work for so long suffered from colour saturation, i'm still miles away in this respect from where i need to be.
Having said all this, i usually like to let an idea sit in my conscious for a while, and stew, dissolve and turn inside out, which i suppose is a way of assessing if it has the necessary critical/conceptual rigour to withstand the onslaught of its violent assension into plastic reality. perhaps this is all you're doing, but you should know the dangers of doing it, the pitfalls you can trip into.

on a different note mary the queen and the sower of seeds is very nearly complete, thank the fuckin lord its been a long one! obviously you haven't seen this yet but one of things i am most happy with is quite a recent moment in its development. i knew it needed something else but i couldn't work out what, until i had the idea that the viewers eye had to be moved more vigorously in a diagonal direction, that could give the piece an extra boost of energy. only the canvas was too full add anything else and all that was in it was necessary so i added an extra smaller canvas to the bottom right and painted a little dog creature with angler fish eyes licking up the shadows. i think this may be one of those epithany moments. it was simply a logical decision with no intention to raise eyebrows, an organic process of addition simply because it was needed. i love that feeling. and i think it could be an interesting way to work which would allow easier transportation of of paintings as well, if i start off with smaller canvas' and add when needed. its a wonderfully unfussy way of keeping a painting alive right to the end.

thats all.