this is how it feels...

Since I set up a table in our living room, locked out of my studio, oh it must be years ago now, I’ve been getting used to new ways. Moving water and paint around in fluid flows across comfortingly weighty papers has been my distraction. Making a fresh familiar. Trying not to listen to any predetermined directions that I offered up, I have splashed and poured and spilt and stroked. Torn boundaries. Isolated eddies. Dried markings. Swirling and coalescing  into the beyond. I see worlds that are watery and sky. Land that is undefined and one. Sky and land together, inseparable. And so began a new series of small works on paper - collages with watercolour, India ink and graphite on textured paper. About the wholeness of our environment. No separation. Made slowly. This narrative thread trails on along many paths and ideas. And there will be many workings on the theme as I try to make sense of their meaning. For me. And for universal connections too. From time to...

Early this morning, as every morning for the last days and beyond, I was sitting yet again in my makeshift “studio” space trying to work - make something out of the mess inside my brain. Water paints, graphite, brushes, pencils, sketchbooks, ink. Twirls and tearings of scrap and good paper. All damaged now The entrails of my endeavours… The guddle on my table was no kinder to my crazed head state. Water and paint then soluble graphite marking? Or soluble graphite lines etched into the untouched white before adding colour? I feel there is something there to chase. But I can’t catch hold of this illusory creature that is gone before I can make focus and name it. Whispering out of sight and sniggering. Slipping away, sidling off. I am a feart beast caught in a snare. Tormented as thoughts constrain and cut in… But this is just messing about with paper and paint, isn’t it? It’s not life or death or anything. And it’s not a piece that anyone would be i...