This series is slowly coming together .I’m working on about 14 paintings together . Some big , some small. Some weeks it feels like one step forward and 2 steps back. Yesterday felt like forward and it was a great feeling. What keeps painting interesting is not knowing what’s going to happen or exactly what it’ll look like in the end.

I thought I’d share what these pantings looked like when I started at the end of last year- before we’d even heard of things like lockdown and homeschooling and Zoom. I ended up putting them to one side for a while because I wasn’t feeling the same as when I started.

I’ve noticed that I can’t paint if I’m in a grumpy or sad mood. My paintings come from a cheerful positive and optimistic place where I have time ahead of me and some music on, or maybe silence except the sounds of the birds outside my window. When I look at these paintings I feel good remembering my time creating them

Bringing back more gestural marks that I’d covered up.

This week I’m focussing on these big paintings and am at the stage where I’m refining and making decisions about what I want to keep . Sometimes my paintings can contain too much and become busy as I add shapes and lines . I have to take some time to look , consider my next moves , check my notes , without getting carried away. I’m getting better at this and have less of the fear that I’ll ruin what I have because I know more from experience that I’ll be able to fix it.

In this painting I added thin layers of acrylic thinned with medium and water over thicker built up paint . Sometimes I get a favourite bit that I don’t want to paint over and I know I have to fight that and remember to stand back and look at the painting as a whole .

During the painting process things happen by chance, like the tiny line or red that got picked up in the brush as I painted a brushstroke of lighter green. It immediately livened up the whole canvas so I knew I wanted to keep it there. We’ll see what happens with the rest of the painting.