Upon seeing his young son Paulo's scrawls, the aged Picasso remarked that he had spent a lifetime trying to paint that way.
It's a favorite anecdote of mine, and if it's seemed that I am oft completely adverse to abstraction, then I've done a disservice to my love of de Kooning, Auerbach or Guston.
And if I've remarked that abstraction comes from a point of cynical ineptitude, then I am definitely doing a disservice to the third generation of Gough's-as my grandson so effectively proves here, with his total, unselfconscious, immersion into this massively epic painting which he annotated as "birdies, tcheees (trees), buzz, sky, fog (frog)" . 
11" x 14"
Oil on canvas
As an iconic image used to the point of obsolescence by everyone from Warhol to Ron English, I realise that it's not bringing anything new to the table.
Except the image had a profound effect on me the first time I saw it as a child in 1974. Those hooded eyelids, looked the same as the Jesus monographs I'd been force fed at church and school, but here was man as god making a monster of his own image. Not that I could have articulated that, it was just hugely exciting to my young imagination and I must have scrawled it on exercise books and blotters a hundred times.
So why repaint it now? Because with just a few days short of my forty fifth Birthday, and five years from my half century, I find myself inevitably thinking back to simpler times.
I'd give all wealth that years have piled, The slow result of Life's decay, To be once more a little child, For one bright summer day.
~Lewis Carroll, "Solitude"
