Let's Talk Art Blog

If you've ever stood on a windy clifftop and come across a battered old chain link fence sporting a rusty old sign that says 'Danger' with an icon of a person tumbling down some rocks, then generally, the message registers.  Go no further, something not-so-good might happen if you venture past this point.  As humans, staying in the 'safe zone' is an innate part of who we are; it's part of our evolutionary story.

As I've been getting ready to begin new work I've been doing plenty of sticking! There are snippets of collage papers everywhere and I thought now would be a good time to do a quick demo on how I get my early layers of collage papers well stuck to my surface before I begin to paint.

When is a tree, not just a tree? Well, I've been thinking.... It seems like a fairly bizarre question to be asking myself, but it's one that's come up in the last few weeks as I've been working on more paintings for my Latent Series, which might be my biggest collection yet.

What if the sky was in the middle? It sounds pretty nonsensical....the real world wouldn't work literally, if the sky was sandwiched between two lumps of earth. But working with abstraction, anything is possible right? Hear me out.... The idea of taking a subject, dismantling it, fragmenting it and then reconstructing it in an entirely different way, isn't new.

Am I a squirrel? Though I might not look like one, I think I'm starting to behave like one! I'm bouncing around the studio between paintings, somewhat like a squirrel leaping acrobatically among the trees. Have you ever seen a squirrel looking as if it's not sure what to do next? I don't think I have.

I am a collector of interesting packaging - not just for printmaking, but sometimes I just can't go past the structure offered by an unusual box! Everything gets vetted before it goes in the recycle bin....