Now it seems possible to determine a size for the picture, indicated here by the optimistic placing of an unworked white panel to mark its top right hand corner. Also a border of masking tape helps to clarify the area on a messy studio wall, the historiated battlefield of many large pastel drawings and paintings in mud.

The need to pin down (or in this case pin up) the likely dimensions, comes from the old pictorial problem of the perilous centre, a Scylla and Charybdis passage which must be passed without stressing that tempting point of natural focus for the viewer. An overemphatic mark or strident clash of colour at this juncture (or a conspicuous absence of event) would make the whole image a vortex trapping the spectator's attention at its middle. In the West (following a habit of dealing with text) we read pictures from left to right as in the East they are scanned from top to bottom. In either case the eye must be urged to traverse the half way mark. That point as can be seen here (directly above the appropriately anxious artist's head) is now, in mid-September, not too far away.

This was the state of play at the start of August. Probing each new panel is like exploring a dark and only half remembered room with a faulty torch.....

Probing into the unmapped territories beyond the edges of the initial panel was exciting. The first move with each panel was to create a field of inconclusive marks without reference to its neighbour; a space for the partially resolved shapes to reach out into and conquer, as in a territorial game. The main guiding systems were already present in Panel I, a dialogue of dark and light and a conversation between large calligraphic forms and the intricate ornamentation of which they were made and which they inhabited. My own tendency to over-clarify the boundaries would have to be fought - i.e. gritting my teeth to relax. The more general question of how large this work would be remained open.

tbc