Afterwards

Afterwards

Welcome to the studio. I am excited to share with you a monthly behind the scenes look at what goes on in sketchbooks, what goes on in my head, how thoughts eventually morph into paintings and how the painting process can also morph into thoughts… Brief intros to all this I put on FB and Instagram, but for a more in-depth story, a bigger picture, you have come to the right place!

I want to talk about the Afterwards series - 50 small A6 paintings, in portrait format because they are portraits of feelings, portraits of the landscape that I am inhabiting without my husband Chris- both metaphorically and literally. Our favourite thing was walking in wild places: along the coast, the moors, 3 Caminos in Spain and Portugal and the lake district. And it is in Helvellyn in the lakes where he now rests, a place where Chris and I walked together for the first time in the 1980’s.

It took me a while to venture out on my own again and these paintings are the result: they are small, intimate, tentative, almost fragile and they ask to be looked at quietly and up close. For weeks I had the car packed with my art materials to go out there and do lots of sketching, but the first times out were dismally heartbreaking. I also hadn’t been in my studio for many months whilst Chris was ill, so was terrified of putting marks on paper. I was lost, disorientated, and felt so hopeless. Slowly I settled into a pattern of just going out onto the moors, and it didn’t matter if I sketched or not, just wanted to be outdoors in the beautiful landscape, remembering all the amazing walks we shared and being aware that with or without us, nature prevails.  There is a sense of loneliness, aloneness and isolation in the pictures but they are also images of expansive open places, so I am looking out onto a vastness, a future,  that is uncertain. They are framed in a white mount-but it is more a window, not a frame- a looking through rather than a holding in - I am looking out, getting ready for the next steps, whatever they might be.

The mount is just a way of displaying the pictures and keeping them clean. I also think framing is a personal thing so I will leave that to you dear purchaser!