An Enormous Expanse of Paint and Good Intentions
August has been a fairly quiet month in the studio. Not quiet anywhere else, obviously. It has been the summer holidays, I have two children, a puppy and a seemingly endless stream of people requiring things from me.
It’s remarkable how everybody can be perfectly content until the exact moment I pick up a paintbrush. Then someone needs feeding, someone needs taking somewhere and the dog has weed on the floor.
The children are ten and sixteen and a half, so it isn’t as though I’m caring for toddlers. Nevertheless, I still occasionally reach mid-afternoon and realise that apparently they require lunch. Every day.
There haven’t been many long walks or days out on the hills either. It has mostly been shorter walks, puppy management, childcare and trying to remember what I entered a room for. But somewhere amongst all of that, I did manage to finish one painting.
Just the one, but it is quite a big one.
I Feel Less Far is an instinctive piece inspired by time spent on the coast in Scotland. It isn’t a painting of anywhere in particular, but it holds something of those open, slightly wild coastal landscapes: dark land, silvery water and a sky that seems to take up almost everything.
I didn’t begin it with a firm plan. It changed as I worked, and for a while there was a mountain in it. There’s always a mountain in it, it’s default for me, so retraining my brain to remove the mountains, sometimes is hard!
Eventually, I painted over the mountain and let the whole thing become quieter and more open. Sometimes the best decision I make while painting is to remove the thing I was initially convinced it needed. I’m sure there is a wider life lesson in there somewhere, but I won’t inflict it on you.
There’s something about that sense of space that I keep coming back to. I like the land feeling small beneath it and the weather looking slightly uncertain as though it could clear completely or turn quite dramatic at any moment. Much like a British summer holiday although this summer hasn’t been as bad as previous up north!
The next piece on my easel is another canvas of the same size, but this time in portrait. So far, it is almost entirely sky. I’m hoping to bring in a stretch of very dark, moody moorland beneath it, inspired by the North York Moors.
At the moment, though, it is mostly an enormous expanse of paint and good intentions.
And that has been the extent of my August studio output: one finished painting and the beginning of another. It isn’t exactly prolific, but I Feel Less Far feels like an important piece for me. It has quietly pointed me towards something I want to explore further, the contrast between huge, changing skies and the darker land beneath them.
Hopefully September will bring more time to do that, I remain wildly optimistic that tomorrow will always be easier.
We will see!
Victoria.
