Maybe it's true that as you get older, the years pass faster! I've never known a year to slip by so effortlessly, and invisibly. Perhaps it's because I have been busy with painting, and busy with Life Events. My niece had a major operation, I've set up my own website (which required many hours, to study the manual on how to do it), and I've been occupied taking paintings to Birmingham be digitally scanned for inclusion on a website that sells prints to 4 and 5 star hotels internationally.
My paintings became more concerned with overworking, to find the right balance of colours and shapes to convey my internal world as well as the external image. Consequently, while I have made many watercolours in situ this year, the numbers of my oil paintings fell, as I worked very intensely on a group of 8. I like the idea that I am free to take them in any direction the painting demands, and the sense of confidence that comes from fearlessly destroying whole paintings, knowing that sooner or later the true form will emerge. And if it never emerges, then the 'failed' painting becomes the foundation for something new.
Increasingly, my paintings either evolve from watercolours painted in the land, or from drawings made from the memory of a place, or concept, or dream. Sometimes all my sources overlap.
(Paintings: 'Women Behind the Trees,' Watercolour, 16ins by 12ins/'Diving into Green,' oil & acrylic, 91cms x 61cms)
