The other day I saw a questionnaire regarding the problems that artists face. The idea was to nominate the three problems that were proving most irksome. Lack of sales, lack of respect and lack of recognition all got a guernsey and its hard not to disagree. This has been the mantra of artists for more than a century, or even longer, since the beginning of the age of independence from the straitjacket of official patronage. However, none of these came to my mind immediately, not that they don’t apply, but perhaps the problems that most bother me, are unique to me – although I doubt it.

For much of the 80s into the 90s the problem that bothered me the most was to be out of step with the world by about eight years. That was the number of years between my moment of revelation and then discovering the work of others who had worked not just in a similar vein, but in exactly the same way, producing exactly the same result as what I was doing, but eight years earlier. I was always eight years behind the eight ball, so to speak without even knowing it. I could put this down to knowing too much about art or of not knowing enough. If I could have recognised the mistake I was about to make during a moment of revelation, then I could have told myself to stop and avoid the frustration. Interestingly it doesn’t seem to bother other artists. I saw an abstract painting put up on a FB site a day ago that could have been painted by Hans Hoffman in the 1940s. His early work, by the way, clearly has the stamp of Matisse about it, just as de Kooning pays homage to Picasso and it didn’t bother either of them. Maybe it’s just me.

That distance of eight years though seems to have increased. I’ve recently been reading a biography of de Kooning. He’s not a painter I ever felt much in common with given his preference for figurative work that attempted to understand his complex relationship with the women in his life, but in 1950 or thereabouts he produced Excavation. I say thereabouts because with de Kooning nothing was ever finished. Any number of possible reasons exist for the painting’s origins from mining the figurative past to dodging past extensive roadworks in New York as new foundations were dug for skyscrapers in post war America. His use of line and painting back into it is clearly visible in my work Conversation With my Father. I must have seen de Kooning’s work at some time although prior to reading the biography I wasn’t aware of Excavation as separate from his oeuvre. Was I subconsciously channelling the painting two years ago when I painted Conversation? I have no way of knowing. Having recognised the similarity, I am seriously thinking about painting over the whole thing but then again, that is exactly what de Kooning did. Then there are de Kooning’s working methods. He regularly cut up and tore up drawings and paintings, reassembled the bits in a different order, and then using the collages as a basis for new work or new sections of an existing work. Currently my work bench is littered with salvaged cut sections of paintings, albeit cut at right angles rather than torn, which I am systematically reassembling in various configurations before enlarging them. The end result has nothing to do with de Kooning but as serendipity would have it, I had to discover the similar thinking at this point in time. Perhaps I should stop reading.

After a lifetime of creating art and reading about it I would like to think that I can produce something worthwhile that isn’t derivative but maybe I simply know too much and, let’s face it, everything has seemingly been done before. It also doesn’t help when gallery-goers come armed with their own banks of knowledge. At a recent exhibition of my work a woman said in all earnestness, ‘you must love Basquiat’. I stood there dumbfounded trying to come up with a response that didn’t sound aggressive or patronising. Taking a deep breath, I asked what she thought I had in common with Basquiat [given that none of the works looked in the slightest like a Basquiat]. She replied, colour. Apparently the blue [ultramarine] I had used adjacent to a section of black reminded her of the street artist turned money-spinner-in-absentia through the offices of Sotheby’s. I couldn’t disagree. We had both used ultramarine. Mind you she also said that I must love motorbikes in looking at a work of mine titled Sleepers which was in some way an acknowledgement of having lost four acquaintances to cancer in the previous year. I still cannot see a single motorbike. As far as she was concerned everything on the walls was derivative and that was her measure of success.

Is it possible to not just escape from your artistic origins and history but manage to ignore them completely? I did read of an artist who claimed that nothing in his work was derivative and he deliberately kept it that way by not reading about art or going to art galleries. All I can say is good luck to him as he stretches another rectangle of canvas and lays out his oil paints. For the rest of us it’s simply an unending struggle to take one step forward into the unknown and hope that someone else hasn’t already taken that step and been recognised by a gallery/critic/museum. Sales, recognition and respect are just jam in the end but having said that, either Greenberg or Rosenberg, amongst pre-eminent art writers, considered that there was no such thing as progress in art. All art exists at once, in the same time, in the same space – and we’ve now got the internet to prove it.