Coloured Prayers

In your book ‘Meet Me at the Well’ you describe your works as ‘coloured prayers’. Could you talk a bit more about this?

Yes, gladly. There have been many times when I have tried to paint more conventional and semi-realistic nature scenes—water, trees and mountains. I tried to challenge my technical abilities and learn aspects of conventional artistic practice with specific outcomes. Some works, mainly in acrylic or oil, succeeded, but many didn’t and looked tired and laboured. Sometimes it’s good to try and change one’s handwriting style deliberately, but one usually comes back to the easier more naturally “you” way of writing. And the same happens in art practice. One cannot but be oneself at the end of the day.

Our inner self-constitution wants to express itself through daily life, and art is a focused means of fixing states of being in time—a record of the moments along the way. And so I have kept coming back to working with soft pastels on paper with inks, gouache and more recently oil paint. Drawing pastels over thick cotton etching paper is still a thrill for me. It still excites me with its dry pigment intensity and quick accumulation of layers and imaginative possibilities. My soul feels confident and alive, and my hand just knows what to do with the colours I choose and marks I make. The activity feels like a prayer offered up—a celebration of the power I can summon up in my small way on a sheet of paper with dry pigments.

There have been many times when I have thanked the creative soul of the world for its revelation in front of me and felt at one with some blaze of imaginative composing that I have been fortunate to capture. It truly feels like I'm given a gift and in that sense, I speak of the works as ‘coloured prayers’.

To discover something surprising; that’s a powerful incentive to keep working with faith and trust in the process, that the doors will open and a whole new composition will birth itself. It’s that which keeps me going back to the art mine to dig for some more gold.