A painting can sit quietly in the studio for weeks before I understand what it needs.
To anyone looking in, it might appear that very little is happening. These quieter periods are often when the painting is changing the most. Not through adding paint, but through time, observation and looking
Most paintings begin long before the first layer of paint is applied.
Sometimes it begins with the changing rhythm of the tide. Sometimes with light moving across snow and ice. More often, it begins with spending time in a landscape without feeling the need to describe it.
Looking becomes a way of paying attention rather than searching for an image.
I’ve come to realise that looking and painting are not separate activities. The time spent walking, drawing, watching the weather change or returning to the same place again and again becomes part of the work, even though no painting has yet begun.
When I enter the studio, I rarely know where a painting will end.
The first layers establish a surface instead of an image. Paint is added, removed, softened and painted over. Some days a painting changes very little. Yet something essential is still taking place.
Often, the most important work happens while I’m not painting at all.
I spend a great deal of time simply living with the work. Catching glimpses of unresolved paintings as I move around the studio. Noticing something out of balance while making a cup of tea. Returning the next morning with fresh eyes. There are moments when one small adjustment alters the balance of the whole painting. At other times, weeks of work disappear beneath another layer of paint.
One of the hardest things about being an artist is learning to trust your own eye and your own painterly language. That trust comes slowly. Over time, you begin to realise that rejection, or someone else’s taste, isn’t really the point. What matters is the making, the looking and the pursuit of a language that feels true to you.
I’ve been angry with paintings.
I’ve slashed canvases in frustration. I’ve painted over passages that, looking back, I wish I’d had the courage to leave a little longer. Some paintings have driven me to distraction because I wanted to resolve them too quickly.
Time has taught me to be more patient.
Not because patience guarantees a better painting, but because distance often allows me to see what I couldn’t see before. What feels unresolved today may reveal itself tomorrow.
Sometimes a painting simply needs to wait until I am ready to understand it.
Painting can be an emotional process, but little of that struggle is visible in the finished work.
What remains, I hope, is a sense of stillness.
One that has been arrived at amid doubt, persistence and time.