New Year reflections
Sunday Girl, Oil on canvas, 160 cm x 130 cm, 2019
Observing the white veil of January frost, I feel warm from the other side of the studio window. The world outside is wounded by Covid and stung by politics. Yet we are ever hopeful.
And here I find me writing a blog. New Website, new year, new normal, new blog.
If you are reading, Hello.
I finish tidying my studio ready for a new start, it will be messy soon enough but clearing the space clears my mind. I’m looking at two unfinished paintings. I haven’t worked on them for a while and I’m in that head space that procrastinates for a few days before putting paint to canvas and then wondering why it took me so long!!! Putting books back on shelves I pause to flick through Cecily Brown. She is showing her paintings at Blenheim Palace but lock down has prevented me going for months on end. Bonnard’s colour cheers me as I slide his book back, strange because his paintings are so full of melancholy. I leave Joan Mitchell and Jade Fadojutimi on my desk just in case.
Most of the paperwork I’m clearing is from a correspondence course I completed with ‘Turps Banana’ over the last two years. I poise to read the notes from my two artist mentors, Hannah Murgatroyd and Sarah Pickstone, another hour goes by.
I read a paragraph from Hannah Murgatroyd’s correspondence to me.
“I love this idea you write about of the passage through, this woman going deep into the forest of ideas - into art itself - seeing herself as a child with all that mysterious potential. This idea of transformation is the key theme to fairy tale, without you needing to paint the obvious symbols of fairy tale. I see it in these paintings. There is a mystic power in the entanglement of these marks, metaphors for the woman as subject that you describe, without needing to depict a clearly painted figure. Could it be that hinting at the presence is enough?”
Corresponding with Hannah unpicked me and threw me back to my core, I’m nowhere near where I want to be, but I began to reach a place where I could move forwards at least for a while.
Women and landscape are what I paint and as my second mentor Sarah Pickstone pointed out being stuck is a good thing, “it’s an interesting place to be, you can choose what to do with it, time helps and working too, and as you say persevering.” I didn’t think so at the time, but having completed some of the journey I understand. Being stuck and pushing through is the only way to be a better painter.
So, what of this passage through, this child in the forest, how do the paintings reveal themselves to be more than the garden outside my window or a woodland walk.
To begin with I worked very intuitively, out in the nature just painting and drawing, quickly until I had enough studies to start unearthing more. I was quite scared; I don’t why, but I think when you begin a new path its exiting and scary. The new paintings had lost the horizon line and were becoming interior landscape, or that’s how it felt, going inside and finding a densely populated other world, jungle-like in its lush overgrown vegetation. The presence of paint and colour seemed to be my overriding concern; drawing and thought could come later. When thought did arrive, I started to connect the imagery with transformation and storytelling. The painting Moon-Child for example; and out of the sky the moon dripped its egg onto a leaf and was a Moon child. Equally the mark left accidentally amongst the ambiguous marks is anyone’s for the taking.
Sunday Girl, a much larger painting than Moon Child, was probably my first attempt at a memory painting in years. Before my moving to West Sussex, I came from South London and Mum used to take me to a park with an enormous weeping willow. I remember moving in and out of its sweeping tendrils, the smells of green and the colours of summer warmth posed such contrast to the urban surroundings outside the gates. Sunday girl was a favourite song, by Debbie Harry, hence the title.
As time passed, I started to combine my own personal intense experiences with studies from the nature around me, women, and using images from Rubens to create paintings like Silent, Echo and Narcissus. I have also began using collage as a starting point for work. In the first lockdown I became dependent on my garden to feed my work, so it became a much bigger ‘other world’ to inhabit. Once more in lockdown I wonder if my winter garden will repeat the process.
And so, I have found this blog reflecting on some of my experiences over the last year and a half.
The course with Turps Banana has been transformative. I am a firm believer in personal development at whatever stage of life or career in whatever capacity. Being an artist requires dedication to a life of self-motivation and dedication to working alone, so having dialogue and feedback on such a rewarding level is incredible and nurturing.
I am now beginning some new work and I will continue to reflect on some of the pieces I haven’t yet shared.
If you have been reading, thank you,
More to follow.
I hope it gets better
From
Jayne x
