Be brave, take risks, don’t reach the end too quickly.
A slight delay in publishing this post, I have been classifying at a Wheelchair Rugby tournament in Poland, an amber list country, that requires me to self-isolate for 10 days on return. In the last week and a half I have had five PCR tests, an uncomfortable experience of having to shove a swab so far back into my nasal cavity it found a space I didn’t even realise existed. Thankfully only two more to go and I will be allowed out. I’m going to keep this post brief as having been away I currently feel somewhat detached from my paint and need to keep going but have just a couple of things I want to share.
First, I have had to re-locate my studio to our back garden shed to self-isolate and work on some smaller pieces. I have those six faces that I last talked about in a post about a year ago. They are only 15 x 20 cm and give me the perfect opportunity to play around with different colour palettes, textures, facial structures and expressions. I so recommend having some tiny canvases on the go, they are like small conversations with good friends, unintimidating, happy to be experimented on and they don’t desert you when things aren’t going well! They have been through transitions some good, some bad and I’ve spent the last couple of days working on these three.
The second thing I wanted to share is about reaching the end of the journey too quickly. In life I am a ‘completer’, if there was such a word. I like to get things done and not drag out the process. I need to stop applying this method to my painting as I love the process far more than I love for, example, sorting out the accounts.
My struggle is that from the outset, I want to see the end, and try to achieve too many details and resolved colours which don’t leave room for the smallest flecks of something unusual coming up from the layers beneath. I need to follow a less premeditated journey with its predictable outcome. I think it’s about giving myself freedom and taking risks. If I was to try and think about a life example it would be something like the difference between travelling for work and travelling overseas. When I’m working I have a list of actions that need to be completed the success being ticking the last thing off the list. When I am travelling, I move spontaneously based on feelings and events that cross my path. I travelled around Australia with a friend in a Ford Econovan, we had been heading South down the coast of Queensland for 2 days, reached a set of traffic lights, looked at each other and said this doesn’t feel right let’s go back. We did a U-turn went all the way back and further up, bumped into a guy who was looking for companions on an off-road trip that was one of the most unforgettable journey of our lives. There was risk, a very close shave with a crocodile, there was the unusual, an encounter with the most eccentric hermit I have ever met, and the celebration of being alive sharing a 50-year-old bottle of port on a beach with friends in the middle of nowhere.
As per usual I am wandering around taking ages to get to the point….. I could see with my painting of Amin, I was in danger of following that predictable route, the painting was looking good, I could have easily kept going rather predictably in a ho-hum kind of way with a successful end result but just before I went to Poland I put a stop to that. I decided to be unpredictable, take risks, use colours that don’t really make sense right now but who knows where they might lead and that makes the journey so much more exciting. Even Jac walked past me in the studio and said, ‘wow that’s brave’, as I painted a long streak of titanium oxide across Amins cheek that was looking just fine before the streak.
So that’s what I’ve done, some would say I have trashed a perfectly decent painting and I would say well that maybe so but just wait-and-see because the journey isn’t over yet.
