INTERNAL LANDSCAPES 2023

I realised the other day, as I was collating these paintings, that for all the years I’ve painted portraits, I’ve never once painted a face from my imagination. And yet I have studied so many faces since my mother first told me to draw what I saw, which was usually a sibling seeing as they just seemed to keep on coming! But, why, when I have also observed landscapes, wishing fervently that I could capture the beauty I was witnessing, have I never been able, no matter how I tried, to capture the essence of one. My attempts always felt disappointingly less immediate and beautiful than the real thing. The awe of witnessing a moment in an exquisite landscape, as a sudden change of light alters the view, or of being with the stillness of the marshland in winter, the sound of a lone bird singing in the cold silence, no painting of mine could ever seem to capture, I didn’t even attempt it. So I avoided landscapes for years. But then a strange thing began to happen to my abstract work. I found that when I approached a canvas I needed to paint every stored element of landscapes which lurked deep in my memory and subconscious. Canyons, wintery fields, vast skies, flat marshland, river banks, blasted sun-baked earth. Land that’s soaked, hot, still, alive, dying, on fire, resting, healing, screaming, weeping, laughing… And then, of course, my paintings taught me about myself. I never begin one thinking ‘I need to paint something peaceful or angry’. I paint very often with my mind elsewhere, but what takes shape is always a surprising insight into what it is I might be dealing with subconsciously.

This new collection follows my previous works, Mindscape Meditations, but I found a hunger to use colour, to break out of the subtle monotones I worked with during Lockdown. It began with a landscape ‘Home With Me’, and what followed next was the geometric large painting, Rose Tinted. I had been through a very tough time, deeply sad, solitary and unstable, painful and frightening but had persevered as those who know any kind of suffering, know too that there is no other option than to keep getting up, to keep getting through the day. But when those hard days began to recede a little into the past, I woke up one morning and could not understand why I had avoided colour. This collection is a celebration of the beginnings of daring to breathe deeply again, of sleeping longer and deeper at night, of being home, coming home again to myself, of moments of loving, of summer, feeling held again and mostly moments of of reflection, sometimes difficult to face, but finding I want to face them with colour.