A big change happened in my work recently and it threw me off kilter for a while. The last paintings I'd done were towards the end of 2021 and I was really excited about the work I was doing - 'yes! This is it!' It was a venture in a new direction, painting on a black background and using lots of texture – fruit netting, thread, plaster of Paris – and I was really into it, in fact really looking forward to getting back to doing some more, venturing further down that road – and then suddenly I came to a screeching halt.
I was working away for five weeks before Christmas, on a Christmas market in Exeter, it was cold and the hours were long, and I was working 7 days a week – and then of course Christmas, and suddenly it's January and I'm not ready for the new year, still knackered from working away. I revisited the work I’d done in late 2021 and found that I’d lost all enthusiasm for it. I suddenly lost all sense of knowing what I was doing, which was painful and scary. Whilst feeling unable to work I spent a lot of time sorting out my studio which felt crowded and chaotic – I was yearning for clarity and space.
I had several panels primed and ready to go hanging on my wall. I took those down. I took all my finished artwork off the walls. Eventually I had a work space that, minus a huge whiteboard and a huge table, now felt blissfully spacious – room to whirl around with my arms outstretched, or indeed swing a cat, if I had a cat to swing. Still no great desire to paint though, I didn't know what to paint. I had this sense that I wanted to be looser, more expressive, more spontaneous. I felt like I always ended up killing the energy in my paintings and overworked them. Designed them too much. That's not to say that I was unhappy with them but just always this sense that there was something more elemental I needed to uncover, dig out – or conversely, to not cover, to leave bare. And ultimately something that felt truer to me.
In the end, knowing that I had to at least do something, I did the only thing I felt I could stomach which was to take a large piece of cartridge paper – I had just one, that I'd had for years – nail it to the wall, and make big sweeping looping shapes in charcoal. That was what I saw in my mind. Which is what I did, and then I added some paint, just a couple of colours – I just let myself get involved in it, followed my instinct, didn't worry about the charcoal mixing with the paint. To achieve this state it's almost like you have to switch off the highest receptors in your brain and operate at a sub-optimum level. A kind of sinking under. Or letting your eyes go out of focus, almost. A surrendering of yourself to the painting. It's hard, really hard to get into that unthinking state, but when you do it's blissful. I think it gets easier with practice.
So I had this painting that was really expressive and honest, and people responded really positively to it, and I thought yes! This is it! (yes, again. How many of these moments we have in our lives as artists!) But it really felt like I was a lot closer to my own truth than I had been for some time. Doing this painting suddenly gave me a starting point, a direction. I immediately ordered a pack of 50 sheets of A1 cartridge paper. My plan was to pin as many sheets up around my studio as I could, and just go for it in that unthinking state, using just paint and pastel, moving from one to the other, zigzagging across my (blissfully empty!) room – and when I found I was starting to think, I stopped. Stopping is a very hard thing to do in a painting, and requires some courage! You are declaring that this is enough, almost daring anyone to suggest otherwise – and resisting your twitchy-fingered desire to keep adding, keep refining. Working on paper is very liberating, there’s not such a feeling of preciousness about it.
I wasn't really sure what I was going to do with these pieces, and I was trying not to think about that, which is difficult when art is your living. It turned out though that some of the pieces I really liked, and I decided to put them out there into the world – this was a very insecure time for me! It's so hard to do something completely different to what you were doing before, and are really pleased with, and to offer it up for judgement, or in today's parlance 'likes' (or the lack thereof). Ultimately however this work's been really well received (you can see them on my shop page here) and I've settled into the idea of it, and am excited about where it'll take me. There's still some conflict for me though – more of which next time!