Now that the schools are back I am now moving forward with new work and new ideas. Ideas that have been taking their time to form since my show in Edinburgh. I fully admit to have been a little burnt out in the weeks after my exhibition; a year of intense creativity. It’s a feeling that can slowly creep up on you, focus dips yet the will is still there. Still in the zone of feeling you need to work but the hand and mind not connecting. My work ethic since leaving college was always to show up in the studio despite sometimes not feeling completely present, this is often where discoveries are made pushing through and bypassing the blip. So this time I decided to simply pick up a pencil and draw. No big paintings to battle with therefore preserving the energy I had remaining. I love using sketchbooks as they take all the pressure off, marks are made without judgement and without the need to take them any further. They are simply what they are and no more and no less. I also set myself a small challenge of making two loose leaf drawings a day. These have really started to excite me since I see them as the essential yet skeletal initial reactions to my wanderings in the landscape. As many of you may know my process has always involved exploration, from firstly being in the land but also through the reading, research and then to the painting medium I use. In the past I admit to having been a little frustrated with myself one day using watercolour, the next gouache, then pencil, pastel, oil so on and so forth. Chopping and changing with each new idea and mood. It often feels I am juggling many ideas at once with little focus. This is simply how my work evolves; it is the layering of multiple ideas, moments, marks, thoughts, moods, a passage of music and painterly techniques that brings about my finished paintings. To add to this complexity I have also been ‘playing’ with film, initially as a diversion from paint, but by doing so it has created a means for me to show and understand my process. Films of water layered over painted marks, or films of me drawing layered over the gentle movement of shifting clouds. Perhaps these are a digital version of a sketchbook, or simply another way for me to create. It’s all part of the process. The element that brings all these disparate ideas and methods together is ‘time.’ The time it takes to process experiences and thoughts, and for these to slowly and sometimes disparately and abstractly find their way into my work. These morph and change into sometimes more direct painting and others more layered and complex imagery. Either way I am pleased to be seeing and making again. My work is string of moments, each has it’s value: clouds moving across the sky, wind rippling the silvered water, a sentence remembered. Inspiration is everywhere and painting serves as a way of making sense of these disparate observations.
A string of moments