CV Indices One set of twenty CV: I - XX : 650 Kb Two sets of ten CV: I - X : 318 Kb CV: XI - XX : 344 Kb Four sets of five CV: I - V : 170 Kb CV: VI - X : 160 Kb CV: XI - XV : 176 Kb CV: XVI - XX : 181 Kb Individual CV pages I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X XI XII XIII XIV XV XVI XVII XVIII XIX XX

Thus this series attempts to redress the balance by exploring, in a sequence of blank verse ruminations and pictorial glosses, the moments when I stumbled upon what has become my 'subject matter', that most important commodity for all artists. I use verse as a dare to myself, having only recently given myself the license to do so independently of another text (e.g. the Inferno). I thought I might be able to match heightened experiences with a heightened style and to be freed by its contraints from dour literalness. In an earthbound version of the same metre the canticles of Curriculum Vitae reflect on the preoccupations of Wordsworth's Prelude, though with more gags. Only CV XX strays from the iambic pentameter and its accompanying couplets. In order to bring the series to a close with a Whitmanesque flourish I experimented with a free alliterative line that echoes the anglo-saxon elegies that I hope one day to translate and put pictures to, such as The Seafarer and The Dream of the Rood.

It takes research to discover the self evident; research conducted in the labyrinthine house of memory of one's own mind. As I sieved my past I found that the seeds of all that obsesses and concerns me in my art and life were all sown much earlier than I had guessed. The couplet which ends CV III and sums up the reveries engendered by a damp spreading mark upon the bedroom wall of my infancy, states the theme clearly,

Implicit in that stain right from the start
was all I've since invented and called Art.

The format of these pieces has taken some while to evolve, Andy Gizauskas, my assistant, has worked to find better ways of making the structures, and I have vacillated over the precise relationship of text to picture. The central image is of course the text, the commentary in each case being the surrounding pictorial matter, which in some cases is also formed out of text. This is a reversal of procedures I have used in previous paintings where text surrounds a pictorial image. Once more I emphasise the fact that I regard texts as images in their own right: treated as they are here with words ghosted behind words to form a (literal) subtext they are all the more image for being doubly text.

The script itself, almost invariably a bastard Roman of my own evolving, is carved back from the rough letter form rather than painted how it is seen (I have got through more Swann & Morton no.15 scalpel blades than a surgeon in his whole career). Since each line of verse has only a line of the script to accommodate its ten syllables, much shuffling about at the roughing-in stage is necessary to space the words correctly, for lines like

and labelled with the lengths of useless screws

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