“But Mona Lisa must have had the highway blues

You can tell by the way she smiles”

Bob Dylan

I’ve said it before

– It’s hard to talk about the act of painting without appearing pretentious

A few weeks ago I sold a painting and my daughter gave me some oil paints for my birthday – it set me off painting again.

I kind of picked up where I left off five years ago before I got hooked up in Facebook.

I’d been working then on a series of portraits in acrylic – it was cheap and dried quickly so I could get my ideas down fast. I rocked out about forty of them over the course of 2013.

Some worked and some didn’t. They had a sketch-like quality but also a direction and relevance of their own. Most of them contained that thing I call countenance – a gesture or look that forms a bridge between the canvas and the viewer.

I began this time by working over the 2013 canvases with oil paint. The ones that weren’t up to much I turned upside down and started again

Oil is harder to get right, like painting with mud and it takes a month to dry but the depth and truth of the colour and texture are so much richer and closer to reality or the world I’m looking to create.

Once I start painting with it I want to go straight to the palette knife and “plaster” the surface of the canvas. You can achieve a wonderful third dimension that has to be seen in the flesh.

There is a trade-off between form and the sheer joy of laying on paint for me – that’s the thing and if it’s not there I cant milk it out of nothing. So I tend to be in painting mode or not and so while it is there it’s important to use it.

Right at the moment I’m trying something more difficult again – a likeness.

There is a photo of Hannah that I took.

She is like a strange and unpredictable sister to me and we are intertwined through my songs and the Spines.

I’ve come to know her very well and rely on her musicality and spirit

And so to paint her is a given but a hard task too

Her personality is huge and her face shifts

In the photo there is an aspect of her persona that isn’t always seen

That’s what I want to get to

It’s hard to know what separates a valid work of art from something that just hangs there and looks nice or something that never should have seen the light of day in the first place.

I think I can see it straight away

That’s why I paint

With the hope of getting it just right

That rare thing

The Ghost of Electricity – War Stories by Jon McLeary is a new initiative at Off The Tracks, a series of stories and reflections from painter, writer and musician Jon McLeary