circles

The paint slides from the brush in a liquid curve as my arm arcs round, the pressure of the brush just meeting the canvas, making a soft friction I can feel in the bones of my hand, my forearm, my shoulder, my chest. And the round form created, completed, now relates to me. It has become its own body.

my eye

I’ve been wondering lately about why my paintings often settle on round forms. Circular sweeps, sometimes completed in one swift movement, or organic forms, moonish, pregnant and present. I tend to complete my circles. There’s something centring, centrifugal, centripetal about a circle.

I like my work to have a warm authority and a fullness.

buddhist singing bowl found on the street

I have been fascinated for a long time with mythology and symbols - how objects are signs, and not just themselves, but resonant with collective meaning. The circle is an egg. The circle is a navel. The circle is an eye. The circle is a moon. The circle is a beginning and an end.

In The Book of Symbols (Taschen, ed. Ami Ronnberg, 2010), we are told that, “the eye receives and emits light, looks out and looks in, is a window on the soul and on the world, revealing and perceiving, seeing through and true.”

And Joseph Campbell, the Jungian mythologist, tells us the grand significance of the World Navel as “the symbol of the continuous creation: the mystery of the maintenance of the world through that continuous miracle of vivification which wells in all things.” (The Hero With A Thousand Faces, New World Library, 2008)

In a human-sized way, my paintings offer their own new energy.

‘love is the colour’

In other news, I’m very pleased to announce that my painting, ‘instinct’, has been selected to be exhibited at the group show this summer at Atelier Beside The Sea in Brighton, UK. It would be great to see you there.

If you’d like to explore more of my paintings, do look at the online gallery.