underpainting - new work on the go

''New work in progress and been thinking about trying to start with something more concrete in terms of a specific image. These paintings come from photos of a town called Aschersleben, in Saxon-Anhalt in old East Germany. After visiting this town at least once a year over the past 8 years the scape has changed slightly in terms of new park areas and some new buildings but large areas remain derelict. The 100 or so photos I took last March when still in winter season found me preoccupied with the idea of seeing something for the first time, walking through the centre and experiencing the sense of its place through the buildings streets and views. There seems to be a younger generation associated with this town but don't seem to be interested in it, for social and economic reasons I guess.  The old stadt is still there and you find ruins among waste patches and then occasionally newer buildings. But there is no fast paced gentrification here. 
I'm not abandoning loose ends from my abstract stuff and will pick this up, but I like not knowing where I am going yet with these new paintings - working from an image of a scene, like a postcard is kind of interesting at the moment and questions how I thought about doing this before..''