Hi and welcome to Art Duesce's honest, generous and humorous conversations to feed your creative

soul and get you thinking with me, Louise Fletcher and today I'm joined by Jonathan Hall.

Some of you know Jonathan he was on the podcast previously he's published novelist a playwright script writer for BBC radio and also my best and oldest friend but not

oldest as in he's not the oldest friend I've got. Well anyway never mind. I know exactly what you

would. Hi Joe. Hello. Thank you're

for that brilliant introduction.

Very good.

So I, as you know, if you were listening last week

and if you're listening back to this later,

this might not make sense,

but last week, Alice and I announced that we were going to get a bit

more lay safe fair with the podcast and make episodes however we felt like doing them on whatever

schedule we felt like doing them on whatever schedule we felt like doing them on. And I really felt like talking about a subject, this subject of starting new work because that's where I am. And I immediately thought of Jonathan because he is about to start or maybe we'll find out has started a new novel and it's that feeling of beginning all over again and before we started recording you were

about to say something really wise and profound about two strands.

So why don't you do that first?

I will say my wise and profound thought.

It might be the only one I have this evening, so it because actually and I see your work from the outside and I see the

journey you've been on these last few years and I see how in that you've gone on the most fundamental

new direction I can imagine by going from the pretty representational to the abstract.

And I love the freedom and it's been very inspirational to me as a writer.

So I see that in new work there's two things.

There is new work as in a new piece of work, new painting, a new story, a new novel, and then there is a new direction of work.

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