March - Shoots, blossoms & buds.

I’m not one for setting my work schedule for the year in January, I tend to work on overall goal setting for the first couple of months, but wait until the beginning of March to really engage with and start new work. For me, this feels in line with the emerging light and the first stirrings of shoots, blossoms and buds. As the world comes out of the shadows so does my urge to create and to make real my inspiration for the coming year.

The process of doing this is both wonderful and frustrating at the same time! There is the magicality of starting with nothing but pigments, brushes and surfaces, then ending up with something that is totally new, something that has never existed before, birthed from almost nothing into something of substance. Easy, charmed and flowing, miraculously alchemical, the turning of base metal into gold.

But this is only one part of the process, which runs alongside a more organic and chaotic one, one much harder to predict and control. I see what and how I want my work to look like, I take all the same steps as I always have done to achieve this, I use the same colours, the same techniques… But – no, I am regularly confronted with something that looks nothing like the planned piece! The elements take over somehow, the creative pixies of unexpected chaos and surprise, dance out into the studio, and reorganise the whole process into something shocking and surreal!

So I try to walk the line between my desired expectation and the glorious unexpected. In many ways, that is where the magic lies anyway, in the liminal space between those worlds... And nature may repeat herself each year, but even now, when I walk around the garden, the unexpected is ever present and her patterns of growth are similarly both magical and unpredictable at the same time.

I’m heading to the studio this week to firm up my painting plans for the next couple of months. The inspiration is ever real and present, just needing time and space to grow into something tangible. I will make a list and work out sizes and engage with the meaning behind each piece. Then I will prepare for the Muse to throw an element of magical chaos into the mix and I will try not to control that magic too much myself.

February - “Nearly there" buds…

As I walk through my garden to my studio each day, I can feel the world slowly stirring into spring. Tiny shoots and “nearly there” buds peeping out of the wood, we are still clothed in dark skies and drizzle here in the Southwest, but each day is stretching out now, and I’m starting to move from planning into doing .

Tomorrow is Imbolc the Celtic festival of fire, purification and new beginnings. The word means ‘in the belly’ or ‘in the womb’ and is a reference to the imminent birth and bursting forth of life that takes place over the coming months. I love this time of year for it potential. Dreams and inspirations germinate beneath the frosty ground, waiting and planning for Spring, the coming months are a blank canvas to be painted upon.

So this week I’m easing into the creative flow by sketching and working on smaller pieces, using paint on paper to allow this year’s inspirations to reveal and ‘birth’ themselves slowly from the page. They emerge unformed but often full of an energy that can disappear from the final paintings, in much the same way that the spontaneity of childhood can get lost in the adult. Capturing the energy of these beginnings and letting it resonate in the final pieces is always a challenge, but I persist in trying…

My personal life informs my creative one, filtering into it via emotion, memory and the need to make sense of all the wonderful madness. At the moment both my parents are very elderly and disabled in various ways. They live close by and as on only child I am on 24 hour call for emergencies (and there are lots of those!). At any given moment I have to drop everything and run to help. The experience is challenging, but has given me the opportunity to re-examine my childhood and understand more deeply the elements that made me the person that I am.

The sky is flat grey here today, but the sunlight behind it causes fluctuations in the gloom. My studio is busy, drawings, everywhere, large canvases on the wall, demanding to be resolved and scattered pages of mixed media pieces fluttering each time the door opens and the winter winds blow in. This week I will create some order out of it all (probably, possibly, maybe…!)

January - Keeping still.

The days are fleeting, the night invades the light time and the world folds itself inwards away from the freeze of Winter. For me this is a time to edge slowly into the year. I create space to consider new work, and thoughts and feelings uncurl slowly beneath the ground, dreaming themselves into becoming.

My studio is often too cold to work in at this time of year. I know that if the pond outside starts to freeze then conditions inside will be perilously frosty, so on those days I work in the house on the laptop, under duvets and cats! Such is the gift of the internet age…

I’ve been working on a major series of artworks entitled FOLDING INWARD as those of you who follow me on social media will know. The series is on one level inspired by the chill of the Winter Landscape, but on a more personal level it is also about withdrawal and going within to find a more personal and profound wisdom than our busy world allows.

I’m spending this January writing about and progressing the ideas behind this work, it takes time and space to allow them to bubble, boil and then eventually form into a creature of sense. So I plan for the year ahead, update website pages, write, meditate and wait for the temperature in my studio to heat up enough to allow human movement!