Starting the New Year as I mean to go on with keeping my website more or less up to date. Sketchbook noodlings and explorations will continue to be posted to Instagram and finished pieces will be added here.
A haul of wood pieces from my local Buy Nothing group has led me down a different experimental path:
– making some egg tempera and creating a couple of abstract landscapes on small plywood offcuts.
and some of the bigger, more conventionally shaped pieces becoming something quite different. Masking with painter’s tape, layering soft pastels and oil stick, fixing with a homemade concoction of milk and alcohol and then dry brushing with acrylic.
Looking out to sea after my morning swim reinforced my thoughts about the rigidity of human thinking and the need to categorise and force consensus. I married someone who sees the world differently because they’re “colour blind” forcing me to really think about the orthodoxies of colour and the arbitrary assignation of names to what is agreed as “blue” or “red”.
Nothing is really that fixed – so much of the norms of our daily life are just norms by convention. That the sky and the sea are blue are just by consensus: really look at the sea and it can be green, ochre, turquoise, silver, grey.
People have reacted in odd ways to my seascapes – some love the unorthodox colours, others say the colours are wrong or that I have a strange way of looking at the world (this is true but for reasons other than colour!).
For me, painting what I see does not mean trying to catch and fix the colours and shapes that people expect. Using colours that sing to my heart frees up my creative mind and let’s something else step forward.
