Recently I have been feeling a slight depression with my work. Preparing for my December exhibition has been going on for two months now and not an awful lot of process has seemed to be made. I do not feel very happy with any of the sketches I’ve produced so far and the clock is ticking for the main pieces. I am experimenting with flat textures with the paint at the moment which is very long winded when I have to wait a couple of days or more for each layer to dry. At this stage of the process it often feels like I am making no progress – repeating actions over and over again in order to produce an exceptionally smooth and bright painting surface.
Today I stood on the seafront for while taking in the tempestuous waves – that murky green grey transitioning from a foamy white to rust tipped flashes. In some ways quite unlike the Menai Straits but holding some similarities. The grey sea is the constant. Both the Menai Strait and Cardigan Bay have their own sublime beauty – something I am yet to properly portray on canvas. Painting often feels totally impossible, that is what interested me so much when I started. That sense of knowing you’re never going to create exactly what you could imagine and then the painting shows you something you could have never imagined. This is a ‘loop’ that I have been swimming around in for some years now. I could liken it to climbing a mountain for hours before paragliding effortlessly from the top.
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