The second piece of writing I did about art - aged 17 - was a study of 4 portraits in the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art by Alexie Jawlenski, Oskar Kokoschka, Emil Nolde and the Scottish artist James Cowie. They were all painted around the same time - 1930s - and were portriats - one a self-portrait - and I was fascinated by the way they looked out of the image and the way that the viewer was asked to look back.

This interchange - between gaze and gazer has consistently fascinated me (and many other people) - but I new none of the theoretical ground work then about the pyscho-sexual power relationships played out in the act of looking and representing - replicating and repeating the gaze in art.

Golan Levin’s Eye Robot is fun …..

The first piece of writing was a confusing ramble on the problem of time in Constable’s Haywain ….. little did I know that this would also be another constant problem that I would return to in my thinking…. that’s for another day