Opening Up

This post might help to answer the question of why on earth I seem to write an awful lot about canvas preparation and process.

I have always been very open to showing my work to people. In fact for those of you who know me, I like very much to shove images in peoples faces and bombard them with more than they bargained for when starting a conversation with me. I have always been pleased with my progress and at the same time knowing that there is always lots of improvements I can make. A few people have taken delight in my progress over the last few years. I have had an extremely supportive viewer base, although my in-your-face approach hasn’t always gone down well with some people! 

My openness to share the images is counteracted by my inability to speak about the meaning behind my work. People would say ‘what is it?’, I would reply ‘it’s a drawing’ and leave it at that. It was never just a drawing. My early work came from an inability to express myself verbally and therefore it has pretty much been left unexplained to most people. Because the drawings were quite detailed and packed with symbolism, I would explain them differently to different people. The more I liked or trusted you, the more of the story I revealed to you. it was very rare indeed that I could tell anyone the whole story and to be totally honest I have kept an awful lot of the meanings to myself. Although I may not have explained things explicitly I think some people could have a pretty good guess at what I was getting at. Some things are just too painful to have to put into words.

Many of my early works focus on the overwhelming sense of grief I felt at the time. I had not experienced anyone truly close to me die before and in this instance it was very difficult for everyone involved as the individual was only a child. I was battling my own guilt and already present existential questioning. There are elements of situation that threw me into an uncontrollable spiral of emotion that didn’t cease for a few years. At this point in time, my faith in the Christian God imposed on me all my life had been so challenged that I would have considered myself an agnostic with pagan tenancies. I was stuck without words in my mouth or a song to sing, bombarded by visual metaphors. I have, since before I can remember, thought in a series of images and actions rather than with an internal monologue. Although I have the ability to speak inwardly, it is not my primary method my mind uses to process things. 

My natural reaction in this situation was to create images that reflect my mental processes in a kind of therapy. Although many of the drawings seem very illustrative and figurative, I never had any plan for what I was going to draw, I would silence my mind in meditation and let my hand do al the work. My hand channelled my subconscious which was very powerful for me because I was often unaware of things until I took that step back. Along side these drawings I was doing studies of the local landscape. The main feature of most of these paintings was the Menai Suspension Bridge that has associated with both extreme emotional pain and turmoil, and at the same time acted as a spring board to recovery. It has taken a few years for the two artistic dialogues, painting and subconscious drawing, to finally link arms and continue together, rather than be separate entities. 

My mother commissioned a portrait of herself and although I didn’t feel it was along the same path as my art is, I was interested in how I might combine the two. I would draw freely and from imagination but instead of silencing my mind completely, I filtered through memories I have of her in my mind’s eye. The resulting portrait was not terribly well received as she said it was not a good likeness but I genuinely believe that the image couldn’t be much better! This portrait is not how my mum sees herself but it was how I saw her at the time. Some people might say that I was just on drugs or something but the emotion conveyed through her large sincere eyes, her lips pursed anxiously, gentle eyebrows floating in a disappointed air of concern. I felt that she was very worried for me, and that’s what came out.