October - Pathways and Shadows.

So first things first, happy Samhain! (or Halloween, or Day of the Dead, or whichever name suits, depending on your preference…!) As somebody with a ton of Celtic ancestry, the eight Festivals on the Wheel of the Year are all really important to me. I feel they mark transition times when we can tune into the seasonal energies and rhythms of the year, in order to honour our own needs as the seasons turn. The period between Samhain and the Winter Solstice marks a time of going inward and this is something I plan to do more over the coming weeks.

The previous month has been a really busy time in the studio, in an attempt to get back into my creative flow, I agreed to get  paintings off to three different galleries this Autumn, possibly a bit ambitious! But anyway, it has certainly got me engaged again… 

In some ways, I have been carrying on with many of the same themes as in the Folding Inward series that I started last year. This very much referenced my engagement with the way in which the landscape looked and felt within the winter months, taking into account my own interaction with it, and personal mythology around it. But in other ways, a surprising element that has emerged more and more is the presence of water in this newer work and the way in which it relates to the land around it. For me the space between these elements always feels very magical, a space of transition, a space where we are neither one thing or another. Sharon Blackie describes it so well in If Women Rose Rooted “ Metamorphosis, the core of so many Celtic myths and stories; so many our sea stories are about shape-shifting. See that dark line of seaweed, thrown up by the tide, which gathers on the pebbles there, between the sea and land? That dark band represents the threshold between one world and another, for at the waters edges, so the old Celtic stories say, you can cross over into the Otherworld. Myth is born here, cast up out of the waves, there for the taking by any beachcomber.”

The current woks still very much engage with the months between Samhain and Imbolic within the Celtic calendar. There are bleak and mysterious landscapes filled with mist and lakes, the sky either points towards night or towards the stark white air of the early morning, which reflects back within the water below. In many ways, I have also found a clarity emerging within the execution of the work which has not been present with previous pieces. I wonder if this is to do with the time that I have now that I am not caring for either of my parents, who I both sadly lost earlier in the year. Somehow the focus has returned and as a consequence the form has sharpened. 

There are also pathways creeping into the paintings, captured in lines and curves, and held within the mark making process itself. I think of these pathways leading me inward over the coming months, as I regain a sense of where I want this next stage of my life and work to take me. In the meantime, I watch the branches emerge on the trees outside my studio and I curl slowly into the rhythm of winter and all that it brings. 

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!