ARTIST'S STATEMENT
People often ask me about painting. Especially now I teach courses in making art internationally and do a fair amount of public speaking, I am asked many questions about my own process and my relationship to my own paintings Over the years, as paintings have gone off to exhibitions and galleries and I have hosted many Open Studio Days, I have written an artist's statement on (and for) many different occasions, as artists are supposed to do. I observe how constant shifts in consciousness bring fresh insights. I doubt those will ever end! This means that I am always engaged in re-writing and trying to find even better words for processes that happen in the place beyond words!
Today those older artists statements are interesting artefacts because they track and map my creative journey over decades! I will illustrate this page with paintings taken from three decades of painting, with some of my oldest work at the top and some of my most recent work appearing at the bottom. There is writing from different periods.
The encounter with white canvas
For me every painting starts with an encounter with a blank canvas or a white sheet of paper. (During the Covid-19 Pandemic I switched to using large black sheets of paper!) There is a seed concept: an idea, a colour, a shape, a piece of music, a sudden insight, often a possible marriage of two unlikely things. Once I start the process of painting I enter a dialogue with the spirit of the painting I am working on. That which seeks coming into form, and embodiment through art, actually guides the process.
In shamanism we call this process hollowing out or being a hollow bone for Spirit, for luminous beings from other realms. Beings more evolved than myself come forward offer a higher perspective on events on Earth and show me glimpses of other worlds, beyond our material world and physical existence on Earth.
< UNDERTAKING Oil Painting 1994