The first time I stood before the waterfalls in Iceland, I was overwhelmed by their beauty. Snow was drifting through the air in minus twenty degrees, the sound of water filling every part of the landscape. The sheer size and power of the falls was humbling.
Cleansing. Transformative.
There is something so elemental about the country. So life affirming.
It was there that I began to think about how to carry this experience into painting. From a distance, the water looks graceful, almost fragile as it falls, yet at the base the force is staggering; gravity pulls strange loops into the descent, a rhythm of repetition that feels both chaotic and calm.
Back on the frame in my garden studio, I tried to harness this same power. I spent hours throwing and forcing paint into the very grain of the canvas, leaving them outside in heavy rain so their surfaces merged with the weather. Moving them indoors was always a struggle; the earlier grounds were so much more chaotic, more aggressive than what I wanted the paintings to become.
Then came the quieting.
Sylvia Plath once wrote: “I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly as the light lies on these white walls.” That sense of stillness became a guide. Over the turbulent layers of Prussian blue, alizarin crimson, and viridian, I poured veils of titanium white. Paint spread across the floor, and I left thousands of white footprints behind me. For months I wrestled with the canvases, fighting moments of doubt and exhaustion. And then, when I placed the first white dot on the surface, I knew.
They would hold.
The series of four paintings is titled From Out Of The Ash I Rise. Each is 260 cm x 180 cm, oil on canvas. The title is taken from Sylvia Plath’s Lady Lazarus. Her words capture the tension between destruction and renewal, despair and persistence, which felt right for the long process of making these works. Their physical scale mirrors the force of the waterfalls themselves. To stand before them is to feel both the chaos of their beginnings and the calm that eventually settled into the surface.
They took over a year to complete, from spring 2022 to mid-summer 2023.
Chaos giving way to calm.