Blog

I've tried juggling more than once.... I can definitely say, it's not on my list of successful achievements! But set aside, for a moment, the image of a court jester's outfit and the three pointed hat with bells on the end and the pixie shoes with the curled up toes.

Where do all the words go when I'm painting? I think a lot. And more often than not those thoughts wander around in my brain as words. When I'm in the studio, thinking about what comes next in my process, or the merits of one colour over another, or my next texture for the gel plate, these ideas are always formulated in my mind with words.

Connections are everything....but where do we find them? I've had cause to think a lot about 'connections' in the past few weeks, and in a variety of different contexts. It's a phrase that's been bouncing around the studio as I work away on 3 big paintings, each in different colour palettes, with the knowledge that they'll hang side by side being a pressing concern in the making of the work. I somehow need to 'connect' them all and I can't rely on colour to help me do this

I had another go at starting with a black background with this little 30 x 30 cm canvas board along with pieces of bright collage paper, some of which had found their way into the early layers of my bigger paintings. Most of the little cutout circles and semi-circles were ones I had lying around, leftover from previous snippings, so I was really just using up what I had to hand.

I’ve been meaning to try beginning with a black background to see what difference that makes to the final piece and I had a 30 x 30 cm board to experiment with, just lying around so I thought I’d give it a go whilst I still had the blues and ranges on my palette. The black underneath created unexpected little pockets of deep 'space' which were intriguing. I’m not sure I could have achieved these without the black under painting.

Following on from my current painting series, I've been having a play around with transposing some of my drawings using the gel plate, which resulted in some really interesting collage papers. I decided to start this sketch on gessoed paper with some big collage pieces to see what happened, instead of my usual line-based starter pieces.