Winter has always felt like the truest beginning for me. Not the spark of spring or the bright declarations of summer, but this. This pared-back season where the land recedes and the mind follows.
I find something cathartic in it.
The landscape hides itself, soft-edged beneath frost and mist, and I do the same. Wrapped in layers, moving slowly, allowing thoughts to settle like silt.
The view outside becomes flat, almost graphic. What was once three-dimensional, the trees, the fields, collapse into a monochrome vista. It’s here I see most clearly. The soft colours reveal a different kind of richness.
This is the season of distillation.
No noise, no ornament, just form and space and tone.
I recognise the rhythm in myself, the need to strip things back, to find what remains when the rest has been burned away.
I’ve been clearing the studio.
Burning old works on paper, ripping old paintings off their stretchers, and offering them to the fire. Making space. Not out of frustration, but as a ritual. As a release. The smoke is honest. It tells me what I no longer need to carry. It's not precious, it's cleansing.
In this stillness, a new series of paintings is beginning to take shape. Quiet, deliberate, composed of simple repeated marks. Dashes that fall across the canvas, pulled downward by gravity, the paint bleeding in watery drips.
Each mark is a breath, a wingbeat, a gesture of return. There is something migratory in them. Something of birds, of angels, of arrivals and departures.
Repetition becomes a kind of devotion, each stroke a way to capture the sublime through simplicity.
I try to create every day, even if only briefly. Not to produce, but to remain connected, to keep the thread alive.
Momentum isn’t speed. It’s attention.
Contemporary practice, at least for me, doesn’t follow the 9 to 5. It follows the seasons, the self. Winter reminds me that absence isn’t emptiness. It’s preparation. Under the frozen ground, the work is already beginning.