Scale is something I've been thinking about a lot recently. I went through to Edinburgh to see a few exhibitions recently - the one I particularly wanted to see was Ron Mueck's sculptures at the National Gallery. I've been thinking about them ever since. Regardless of whether they provoke uncertain reactions from different people they made quite an impact on me. I wandered several times around the rooms and took in different aspects each time I encountered an individual piece. I particularly liked the way that each sculpture was allowed large areas of space with very little clutter or distraction.

Most of what I took away from the show was a strong feeling of being prodded in an instinctive way - feelings that were elemental and difficult to put into words immediately. All kinds of issues involving humanity in physical space were explored but much of the strong emotional reactions were primitive.

Anyway, its only there for a few more days - I strongly recommend going along to see it while there's time.

In other news, I think my fish is finally on his way out - about to go to the great toilet bowl in the sky. He's had a bout with some kind of cancerous thing in his abdomen - lots of unpleasant lesions that seemed to calm down after awhile. Unfortunately, cleaning the bowl this time around may have been too much a shock to his system.

Still, its been a good innings for a goldfish - I'll be sorry to see him go. He's inspired a few paintings here and there.

Its been a while since I last wrote in the artblog. I've been working hard on two completely separate things.

First of all, this beast of a painting is still ongoing. I suspect this is a major turning point after all these images depicting flesh. there are elements of landscape studies that are beginning to creep in. I want to create the sensation of the anguished body emerging from structure. I was trying to hint at man-made objects and city skylines from which the body starts to emanate. By keeping the brushstrokes loose and bold, I'm using the mechanism of blending flesh tones as in the previous works as well as allowing the technique to contribute its own presence.

But then things changed - they started to evolve and pull me in unexpected directions. I suddenly felt strong urges to add more physical structure to the painted surface. I've had the feeling for a while that this piece was going to be an important departure for me so I allowed these urges to assert themselves - I went straight to rummage in my box of found objects and started gluing objects and arranging them on the painted surface.

So far, I've included surgical tubing, syringes, cardboard, plywood, polystyrene (partially melted in places with acetone), baggage straps, fabric and sheets of coloured plastic. Every so often I pick up the brush or a grouting trowel and heave on great wads of oil paint and spectragel, enhancing the 3D forms and colouring them in clashing ways.

The process is confusing and fraught with problems. For one thing, the studio's natural light comes in from a side window and the stark relief of the objects on the painting's surface completely throw my eye off working with colour. Best results occur in the evening when artificial light can be manipulated more easily. The "style" of this painting is as yet unknown to me because I'm allowing it to reach its own conclusion. For the most part, it seems too busy at this stage without enough cohesion in its forms. I believe that when it eventually arrives at a state of completion, I will have brought the image together with some sweeping, random changes. If I assign a stylistic theme upon the whole surface and still achieve the effect of a figure emerging from the structural chaos then I'll be happy.

It seems reckless to me, to allow such haphazard and unplanned methods exert themselves on such a large "canvas" - these are not my usual preparatory habits at all. I still have the feeling that I'm engaged in underpainting and that the actual surface of the finished image is still a long way off. I'm allowing this painting to slowly deposit itself on the board in a slow steady series of occurrences, like sediment. More than anything I'll have created, there will be a heavy mass of stuff hanging from this board, looming off the wall.

I'd like the whole thing to have a powerful initial impact to the viewer after which the eye will be led into the detail - the shapes and objects, scrapes and mistakes. Overall, I think it will be a distressing image. There's a lot of angst and tension tied up in this. I am not keen to title my paintings normally but I think this one demands to be given a name, for better or for worse.

It was certainly an event to get the local people curious. The housing estate was completely transformed. Fences surrounded the perimeter of the set and within a crew of two hundred prepared for each shot.

Obviously, with that much gunpowder and other equipment, there were some big safety concerns. Many of the surrounding buildings had been draped with tarpaulin sheets protecting them from the spray of paint and fragments.

The paint itself was formulated to be as vibrant as possible - almost fluorescent. Of course, it wouldn't exactly be healthy to throw that much paint around if it were average household gloss. Each colour was made of non-toxic, water-soluble and biodegradable products.

Dressed in a hard hat, I was baking. The explosive blast of each spray of paint was punctuated with long periods of sitting around. As I couldn't use my own camera at all times on the set, I sat on the grass, trying to capture some of the spontaneity of each shot quickly within the pages of a sketchbook.

I was struck by the noise and unpredictable effects of a different colour hitting such a large expanse of stonework. Some barrels were exploded up in the eaves of a building, others were set off at ground-level with deliberate targeting in mind. Some were carefully timed to coincide with a camera on rails following each blast, others were detonated in unison like a cannon battery.

The scale of the whole thing was breathtaking. The main tower block had been derelict for some time. Many of the glass panes were missing and there was no sign of recent habitation - so the crew had spent days prior to the shoot installing hundreds of new windows and hanging fake curtains.

I'm continuing with the flesh - this cadaver that seems prone and vulnerable. Actually, I'm probably thinking more about this body than painting it. I know I don't want to depict a figure that is doing something. Rather, I'm trying to create a sense of something acting upon the flesh - something not necessarily physical. I don't want to show restraint of this form but I know I'm implying some kind of psychological restraint.

Instinctively, I know its time to move back to large format work and I've prepared two boards that will house the image on a scale that I rarely work at. I'm getting close to summing up an aspect of this recent work and I want to make it big.

Once again, its exciting to prepare huge boards - the carpentry and priming.

I'm finally introducing other elements into the background of the image. Simply, its an emanation of the environment in which I live and see every day. I'll hint at buildings and the colours of the sky, that's all.

I tend to keep a sense of my surroundings as immovable. If there's any aspect of my thoughts that ring out at me from my paintings more than anything these days, it is this feeling of unchanging - an inability to influence events or their timing and outcome. Since being back in the city, I travel by public transport and the railways compound this feeling of lack of control. I'm not sure if we all divide our lives into those things that we can control and those things that we can't but I feel a strong sense of all these issues leaking around the edges of the sketchbook work in preparation for these big paintings.

The city's infrastructure echoes predetermination. We move and work to clocks and timetables - finite numbers and well-defined quantities. When I observe the city, I see the regularity of the aircraft going overhead and the views I'm accustomed to. Yesterday, however, I had a very odd experience. I was invited to attend a very large "artistic event" that is part of an advertising campaign for a tech company. I was able to view the site from a helicopter before being given a larger tour of the city and surrounding scenery from the air. I'll be writing more about this event soon.

While up in the air, the pilot asked if there were any requests for sights to see. I knew we would be heading roughly in the direction of my flat so I asked if we could hover closer to my neighborhood. Well, he spoke to air-traffic control to ask their permission which was subsequently granted. We flew to the area and he circled my flat while I took pictures. I haven't stopped thinking about this since.

A little side-distraction has filled me with energy. I took my new camera out for a big long walk the other day. I wasn't expecting to take many pictures. My friend Dan came along for the walk and within about twenty minutes I was finding all kinds of things in the environment that seemed worthy of taking pictures; but not without a distorted form - a human form - amongst the features within the environment.

I find it so hard to describe exactly why these ideas resonated so strongly but before I knew it, I was commanding Dan to lie on the ground, against the walls, face this way and that, all for the purpose of taking a huge series of photographs. Instantly I knew that the photograph was only the first step and that digital manipulation would be the next stage of the experiment. Although the results look nothing like my paintings I intuitively know that they are linked.

I capture little arguments in my mind's eye, an internal dialogue that is trying to quantify where my work is going right now. I cannot form a conclusion and I don't feel that is necessarily a bad thing. Too much analysis would mess up this process of intuitive experimentation. But one little concept that keeps shoving its way to the front forces me to direct my attention to where the body ends and the air begins. By this I mean that something about all this work, be it in paint or pixels, is zooming in my gaze on where the flesh stops and the environment starts to surround the body. Can a body be environment? Can the air broach the boundaries in and around the body. Are perceived people environment or cadavers themselves? The paintings' crosshatching is forcing me to confront the limbo within which the bodies are twisting and coiling.

On our walk, I found so many visual cues that were unfettered by local movement or the disturbance of the public, yet they reeked of elements of human activity. These included names sprayed down the length of a path, colossal brick arches, abstract shapes in a deserted playground - all manner of intriguing little set-pieces for experimentation. Dan and I arranged our bodies for distortions on the theme of habitation. The camera clicked away.