tripping along on a tangled path… 

breath fills the vacuum

and in it

life of all and on

This was a painting that I struggled to make sense of.

I just wasn’t making connections between my painted expression and what I was feeling.

But it’s a familiar place to be and I kept on working on it, leaving it alone, considering, letting go.

Breakthroughs come with a certain scratching of tools over surface, revealing fissures between my working fingers for air to rush in and make sense.

These two paintings - breathing wingbeat air & stories of flying and transformation - are the biggest of this body of work. There’s always an extra level of excitement when I’m working on bigger panels.

It’s expansive, seeming to stretch beyond the containment of edges.

As I began, working across both paintings, I had no thought that they would be other than part 1 and part 2 of “breathing wingbeat air”. Their composition began in similar ways after all.

Not for the first time my direction slid into tangents as I reflected on my mark making. They started out from the same narrative but the second was moving, extending out beyond that place signposting what would happen next.

I was discovering the stories as I moved on with the painting.

And I love this part of what I do.

Exploring, opening, discovery.

An adventure with both techniques and ideas…

These collaged pieces were made in the height of the first Covid lockdown.

I was looking for a way forward, turning to watercolours on a table at home when my studio in Kirkcudbright was off limits for familiar painting in oils.

I found that I loved the movement I could achieve on paper, a different way of mark making more directly taken from sketchbook pages.

I pieced together ideas, exploring techniques I would develop still further later with oil colour and cold wax medium.

It’s still a process I continue to use, punctuating my more dynamic, gestural oil painting.

We can look up and recognise where we belong and at the same time know that this is our shared connection.

I think of the sky overseeing, embodying our histories and supporting all life.

With the addition of distressed cotton scrim, (see also “overcoming shallow”) to the panel with gesso at the initial priming stage, I was able to shape the expression of the piece with a definite textural narrative.

I like to allow paint to gently brush over this texture as a highlight or drag it in clots over crevices.

Decisions are made early then, on where to create shadow and depth, softness and subtlety.

the wind carries breath of all breathing 

When horizon divisions just don’t matter to what is here and experienced in the now

Oneness all around.

dreaming of flying

soaring into the barnacle sky

goose bellies winged above me

so clear

surely I could touch them

slipstreamed stripes of silver grey

slipstream breathing