Stripping to the Bone: Entering the Fertile Void

Friday night notes from the studio: leaning into my personal art practise - which always says it as it is! Below, shows a current canvas in progress (left), with similarities to a December 25 piece (right).

First of all, no photographs of my paintings / canvasses of exploration do them any justice whatsoever. They are not willing to be fixed into a snapshot or a contained image. They shapeshift. They are alive and carry a consciousness of their own, layered by my consciousness at the time of creation, as well as the observer consciousness (mine and others) as well as the shifting natural light in the room.

Sometimes your landscape changes completely, clearing away the structures you’ve been pushing yourself through the motions to maintain. What can look from the outside like a sudden collapse, is often an involuntary DeGrowth—a systematic stripping back to the bone.

This current canvas, developing tonight in the studio (top left), emerged from working within a dedicated container. The momentum of focusing on a structured topic provided the grounding I needed to just allow the background energy out of my body. What started as abstract, mark-making release, quickly became a space of massive personal insight.

A snapshot of this raw, fluid surface, captured on my phone, revealed a striking visual resonance with a formal portrait I completed last December (top right). That previous piece captured the final, fleeting edge of an old personal cycle, held together on the surface, but fragile underneath. Working intuitively and without direction here, has allowed me to completely dissolve that outer mask and view the underlying emotional transition in progress.

This period of transition and quiet containment, resulting from the void / field of all possibilities, describes a place of massive fertility. When you allow art to unfold with the answers - sought or not, we can see a new path unfolding.

We cannot always choose when our life landscape shifts, but we can choose what we build in the clearing. The process continues.

Canvas in Progress: Duality and The Void. Created in Dec 25, on retreat in London, my art consisted of dots and triangles. My first experience of working from a place of nothing.

Canvas in Progress: 1 of 3 large abstract void pieces in creation. It is fascinating watching different aspects develop, letting the art direct itself. A hard focus to maintain on large panel pieces; one new mark can completely alter the focus of the whole piece.

The above four images, show further deconstruction of the canvas, working to simplify the image down to more clearly show the deep imagery that appears to me; not necessarily obvious at first glance to another.

My process: as I intuitively join the lines and triangles, developed from how the paint lands, the canvas starts to communicate with me. Not pushing it for an explanation, it gradually unpacks, layer by layer revealing something profound over time.

This process started in December 25 or even before (Sante Fe Mountains October 2023) when I was working with the petroglyphs on a scared art retreat. This sparked a deep exploration of how art can shape shift, which is a fascinating, ongoing enquiry.

Above: starting to clarify which images work best on the canvas backgrounds I am creating. Experimenting with majority monochrome projected images, some new, some from my archives. Now that the canvasses, concepts and set up are coming together, refining the combination of projected imagery and background canvas to more precisely convey the key messages that are central to this topic is starting to take shape.