I’d be unusual if I hadn’t found this last year quite strange, challenging and difficult at times, and I’ve had my ups and downs both creatively and personally. I have spent many hours making art, and for that I am utterly grateful, not only for the space, time and freedom, but also the opportunity to express myself, and actually help get myself balanced and focussed.
I am thrilled to have moved into a new, much bigger studio a couple of weeks ago, which has allowed me to not only work on a bigger scale but also to immerse myself in a piece for a few hours on my own (getting me out of the house is an event in itself!).
So I’ve begun with a few existing canvases that needed something, anything, to shake them up and inject this new energy that is emerging after 12 months of stresses and strains of the pandemic. I’m not consciously channelling ‘specific ideas’ yet, but I am engaging with the formal elements of abstract painting - tonal values, colour exploration/relationships, varying the marks and finding more innovative methods to apply the paint. I think there is a sense of ‘emergence’ going on here, where I’m looking less and less at the landscape and finally finding my own groove with abstraction again, and more engagement with the paint.
This ‘emergence’, as I see it, is about the energy trapped between the layers of paint, revealing itself, it’s insides, though tiny gaps under opaque colours, through thin glazes over textured surfaces, and through strong contrasting values. There’s an honesty and simplicity about this process driven approach, and it has taken away a certain pressure I put on myself to make work about something, or producing work that looks a certain way. I could agonise (I do!) about what kind of work I want to create, but fundamentally these paintings are all I can make, and there is no pretension to pretend otherwise.
I am devoting all of April/May to an intense period of painting, working on some larger scale pieces, so I hope to document some of that process on here in my next blog posts. First layers below…
