Sometimes the marks don’t make sense until the next day. Or the next year. But there’s something that made you paint it. It is put to one side, discarded perhaps as the marks or colour seem alien to my then present psyche. Stepping out of the comfort zone is truly unnerving yet so liberating. New ideas bursting, new directions waiting to be explored. For several months now I have been pushing the boundaries of the comfortable. The need to paint ever present since there are new discoveries to be made. I have always wanted to find new ways of expression. From my very abstract days of college I have explored paint. This is my currency, the energy that is found through the ecstasy of moving paint around with pure expression. Whether by quietly by hand or poured, drips, or scoured we know it is authentic when we find within it something that has been sensed or seen whilst being in the landscape. A reminder, a touch, an atmosphere.
Lately I have made a promise to myself to write more. We can become so engaged in the visual spacial planes, the technicalities of painting that it is easy to disconnect with the reason. If we disconnect with the reason then it is harder to see. So to go back to the dicarded painting I mention at the beginning. It is not that the new painting is alien or wrong, it is simply the way of creativity. I believe new work should challenge you and make you question what you are seeing and also take you back to the source. There should be eddies and portals, estuary mud and the metaphoric storm. If there weren’t then where would we be? Unchallenged, dissatisfied and disengaged.
Writing for me has always been a way of quietening the busy mind, focusing on the reason and helping see the validity of those new marks.