Spring Fever

As Spring unfolds day by day, painting ideas are bursting into my mind at fever pitch. In 10 days I stretched up 8 canvases, primed them and scrubbed on a thin layer of acrylic colour - usually a grey, lilac or pale brown. I like to work into a colour, as it gives me something definite to react against, and often I allow the colour to become mottled or uneven as I tend to carve my shapes out of this colour. But Spring fever threw white onto my fresh canvases and I'm working directly into wet white paint. It gets pushed around with my biggest palette knife, softened with my fingers, and scribbled on with all manner of brushes. The energies of Spring translate themselves into paint, and I believe that even the most abstract of artists are affected by this sudden flow of light and splatters of colour.

I always work at a restless, fever pitch, as I squeeze my painting hours between being a Carer for a disabled child. I manage to paint between 20 to 25 hours a week, and draw at any hour of the day. My time as a Carer tends to occupy the early mornings and evenings and nights. The ideal is to be a full-time artist, and I have just put my work for sale on several websites as prints and originals, and updated my own website with a view to selling work there. Self-marketing also has to be fitted into my day, as I search the internet for exhibition opportunities and join new websites.

The painting 'A Landscape of Choices' refers to the choices made about paint, marks, and colour, and is about my inner landscape, and reactions to the paint. The traces of my choices are left on the picture. I wanted the painting to suggest the passage of time - the time between each brushmark and choice, the choices we make in our lives.

('A Landscape of Choices,' Oil and acrylic on board, 91cm by 61cm, 2012)