Why I Paint Empty Spaces

Clothes carpet the floor, tools spill out of cupboards still waiting for their doors, laundry gets so deep I've wanted to drive in the mini digger. Living in a busy house hold of children, cats and ongoing major Grade 2 listed house renovations can feel chaotic. There's moths in my jumpers so the freezer is full of clothes instead of ice cream. Sunshine brings children to the pond and trails of swamp weed follow them up to the bath and back to the pond again in a seemingly endless cycle. The clean towel pile is ravaged until we're drying the kids with tea towels. Sunny days are glorious but chaotic.

finding sanctuary in a wide open canvas

On my walk up to the studio, a renovated cow barn over looking fields, I am transported to another realm. The lists fall away, time falls off the wall and I find sanctuary in a wide, open canvas. I pick up my brushes and push colours around. I don't start with a sketch, I work things out as I go along. The process is revealing and unravelling. It's the sense of surprise that I love. Using objects and marks as arrows, I direct the viewers gaze around the picture, circling and containing. Initially I build up a busy picture of forms, reflecting my often cluttered brain, like shapes that tumble from cupboards. As compositions develop and layers build up, the process is then about simplifying. This is the immensely gratifying (if not scary) part when I block out large parts of the painting with colour and spaciousness prevails. The busyness and chaos of marks and shapes slowly find order and balance and the space around the objects which I choose to leave, become as important, if not more so, than the objects themselves.

pause to reflect and imagine

The absence of things gives more life to that which is present. The chair that sits alone suddenly takes charge of the space and has heightened significance. The colour, deep in it's layers, pulls you in, sooths and expands.  Colours that appear flat hum with different tones. There's nuances that will reward you if you choose to look closer, or for longer, or deeper into emptiness. There's a sense of relief as I paint wide open spaces, a sense of decisiveness and order. Looking into open spaces, we get clarity, a pause and a place to reflect and imagine.

perfect imperfection

I like to draw attention to lifes' imperfections too. The striving for peace, balance and harmony informs my compositions but there's always something a little out. Something perfectly imperfect. The fields of imagination and reality can often be blurred, our perceptions of each can be different. My paintings nod to these uncertainties in their ambiguity. A field of colour may be a wall, or a floor, and what appears to be the horizon line could also be a tables edge. There's a dreamlike quality to these ambiguous spaces and in these fields are hidden potential and secret fruits.

UNknown adventures

So, I'm quietly amused by how busy my day was looking this morning and how long I've just spent writing about empty spaces. It's these creative meanderings, adventures and outright cliff jumps that I love about being an artist.

I hope that the empty spaces in my paintings offer breathing spaces. I hope their beckoning voids invite you to fill them with your own narratives, reflections and dreams. In my own practice these quiet spaces are sanctuaries and colours fields are like portals to step into, to reset and recharge, to return, hopefully rested, to tidy the house.