From 19th February2022 newletter - I’m behind with posting!

I’m on a complete shift around and sort out in my studio - changing the space and trying my best to practice the discipline of not getting distracted. As I move sketchbooks and notebooks, getting distracted is an easy place to find myself. It’s interesting but the task at hand just takes longer and causes tiredness of brain.

My studio already has two high stacked piles of drawings look back on, to refocus, to remember, to reignite, to move on from. It is also a framing studio at the moment, in preparation for Welsh Art Week next month.

However…I allowed myself a quick glimpse, one page, a random page, from a notebook circa 2002 - very hastily written by the looks of it

‘Painting is but another word for feeling’ , John Constable (1776-1837)

‘When pictures start to tell stories, boredom enters in’, Francis Bacon (1909-1992)

I’ve never been one for narrative paintings yet behind each painting is a story.

I've got a little box of watercolour tubes that I've had sitting around for a few years. My father-in-law gave them to me, his father was a painter. I, or perhaps they, have been waiting for the right time.

I've found it difficult to get motivation moving these last two weeks. It is far from a usual problem. Perhaps there's the overwhelm of moving house and trying to clear a pathway into my studio where things have been strewn amidst the chaos. Plus the bliss of finally being in a house and wanting to slack out on the sofa.

I did something I've often done when I don't know how to get started. I went to the sea. I packed my special off-piste snowboarding rucksack - used for day long adventures. It helps me to create intention of letting go and exploring what comes up. Off to find a wild, windswept, isolated beach I did.

I packed a little portable set of watercolours. Perhaps the time is right now to explore watercolour but…note to self to not drift too far into the allure of what they can do - the pooling, the reticulation - not make 'watercolour paintings' per se but to use them in my own way. For this, they seem a good quick sketching tool.

The morning started with a thick freezing fog at home, the journey to the sea opened out and the long steep walk down brought a pool of sunshine to where I positioned my belongings on a flat boulder.

The day was beautiful.

The sea was calm, small waves dolloped the shoreline dragging pebbles away with them. Such a beautiful sounds that makes you sit very still and Listen. Out at sea cloud was low and colours were limited to gorgeous greys and aqua of the small cresting waves.

By the end of the day I was watching the freezing fog roll in and envelop the beach.

Play the above video to watch waves dolloping onto the shore in fog.

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