Information by accretion

At the end of last year, chatting over lunch, David Mulvey suggested that I should think about the role of accretion in my trapeziums (this won't make any sense without knowing what I was saying before). Typical of me, I'm afraid, I didn't respond at the time - I think I suggested to David that I'd already addressed that, in effect, by talking about the role of history in forming the function of the trapezium.

Accretion seemed the right word for an experience last Saturday, however. I had lunch at the York Art Gallery, and, with only a few minutes to spare, had a quick look around their Stanley Spencer exhibition.

My immediate reaction to the first paintings I saw was not positive. But after walking around the exhibition a couple of times, it was if I'd started to understand how Spencer was seeing the world. Somehow, it felt as if merely looking at lots of his work, was starting to equip me to understand what we was saying. It's often like that, though, with any art - music, architecture, poetry... Accretion seems a good word for it.