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.

Tom Phillips treated Victorian Novel A Humument, a work in progress since 1966, is the subject of an exhibition at the Keiller Library at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. The exhibition opens on 6th October 2007 and runs until 6th January 2008. There will be an accompanying booklet with texts by Tom Phillips, Graham Rawle and Clive Phillpot and on Saturday 6th October Tom Phillips will talk about his work in conversation with Graham Rawle at the gallery.

This year the London Artists Book Fair takes place at the ICA from the 23rd to 25th November. On Saturday 24th November at 2.30pm in Cinema 2, Tom Phillips will be in conversation with Hansjorg Mayer, the publisher of A Humument with an accompanying exhibition.

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.....

The opening party for Tom Phillips new exhibition, WORD;IMAGE;ORNAMENT, takes place on 23rd October 2007 at Flowers, 2nd Floor, 1000 Madison Avenue, New York 10075. The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday 10am to 6pm.

Tom Phillips returns to the Institute for Advanced Study this Autumn and during his visit there will be two workshop performances of Heart of Darkness, a chamber opera of the Joseph Conrad novella composed by Tarik O'Regan to a libretto by TP.

The first on 9th November 8pm at the Wolfensohn Hall, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton is a concert reading of scenes with Tarik O'Regan and TP in association with American Opera Projects. The performance is open to the public and tickets are free, but they should be reserved in advance. To request tickets or for further information about this event, please call (609) 734-8175 or visit the IAS website

The second concert reading will be on 11th November at American Opera Projects South Oxford Space, 138 S. Oxford Street, Brooklyn, New York, where Tarik O’Regan and Tom Phillips will take part in a panel discussion about the piece. For further information and to view an extract visit the Opera Projects website

On the 5th November there will be a party at the Flowers gallery in New York for friends and patrons of American Opera Projects.

There are plans for a further performance in London next Spring in association with the Genesis Foundation.

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

Emerging from the Panton Street Odeon after seeing The Seventh Seal again (I see it once every fifty years). I realise that I now have something in common with the knight (the amazing Max Von Sydow) and his squire (Gunnar Bjornstrand) - I will fail to reach the same destination ... since they are bound for Elsinore.

And I am emerging also from an exchange of messages between my Peckham studio and the very castle in which the story of the Gloomy Dane is set. The author of the official guide to Hamlet's home contacted me a year ago having heard of my work the Ghost Library (which came down this week from the walls of the Royal Academy). His enquiry sounded friendly and was accompanied by a copy of the interesting guidebook: he intimated that Elsinore might welcome a showing of my work when it was done; a cherished idea optimistically announced as a probability earlier in the blog.

What in fact ensued was the most frustratingly tedious correpondence I've ever entered into. Not only were my sometimes light-hearted exegeses of the work (was it Mao or Lenin who said you can't make a Hamlet without cracking jokes?) crushed by page after numbing page of wilfully obtuse pedantry, but it transpired that my correspondent lacked the authority to accept the work and moreover would not support any plan to show it in the castle at all.

Meanwhile I have promises to keep. One is to make an image of a banana as a campaign contribution in support of Turps Banana an excellent quarterly in which painters write about painting...a non-flashy forum that is not, like so many art journals, a pimple of matter on a mound of promotional hype or a few bits of critical prose that serve to keep the adverts apart.

I told its co-editor Marcus Harvey that I'd only met one banana, the disgraced former President of Zimbabwe. I have, it so happens, a poor record in meeting world leaders. Disgrace is a common factor, since my roster includes Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe and Tony Blair. If Hillary Clinton gets elected you have been warned.

For some reason some kind of skipping rhyme came into my head to accompany Canaan Banana . I felt the need also to rescue my lovely Olivetti portable from too many years of neglect. How pleasurably physical is the bangy act of typewriting and how fine the font looks after acres of computerface.

Meanwhile Embassy Signs Ltd. of Bellenden Road have, after some adjustments I made to the prototype, produced, in laminated plastic with perspex slide, a handsome multiple of my favourite device. I can't do better than quote my original description from 1965.

A shop that I pass regularly on the way to the studio had a small red and white plastic sign saying C LOOPSEEND. Since the shop sold yams and sweet potatoes I assumed that this was the name of the proprietor; the double vowels suggested Dutch however and I was puzzled each time I passed it.

Having seen this name for about a year and having thought it odd but probably liable to rational explanation, I suddenly came across its double in a second-hand shop in Ipswich in 1965. I was about to ask the shopkeeper whether he was any relative of his namesake in Camberwell when I noticed, in the back of the shop, many piles of similar nameplates, each bearing the inscription C LOOPSEEND.

For some reason I made no enquiry in the Ipswich shop but asked instead at the Camberwell grocers.

'Is this the name of the shop or a brand of banana or what?' and received the reply:
'No, it's broken, mate. There should be a sort of panel thing what goes over the top covering the letters so as you can sort of slide it along like, to make it say open or closed.'

I had failed over a long period to connect this sign with either its combined and opposing messages, or with the hundreds of complete examples I had seen in almost all the shop doorways in England.

My delight in the discovery has in no way diminished since I first introduced it into a painting (A Little Art History) shown in my first one man show. Indeed it has taken on new resonance as it reflects aspects of philosophy, science and politics that I have encountered thereafter. I'm certain that uncertainty has no more eloquent emblem.

C Loopseend, plastic and perspex, h15cm x w39.5cm x d2cm 2007.