May 31, 2022

Diary of a Wildflower

Diary of a Wildflower is my latest and first collection of 2022.

I have so loved working on this series of paintings. Over the past year my work has been shifting more and more into abstraction. I've become less interested in representing how things look and more interested in capturing how they feel ~ in capturing their energy. It's been a real process of self-discovery, of paying attention, of looking inward to see outward and to uncovering the things that really light me up

There are many narratives within my work: the natural world, things not always being as they seem, spirituality, symbolism and the history of mark making all inspire both my process and my work. I choose colours that are intended to be joyous, uplifting and light. Because so much of life isn't. What can I say, I'm forever an optimist. As my art hero Ken Done once said, "what's more serious than to feel joy?"

“It is a serious thing, just to be alive on this fresh morning, in this broken world”

– Mary Oliver

So much of Oliver’s poetry is about pausing, looking, or rather seeing. Seeing beyond the landscape as a whole and instead paying attention to a tiny wildflower in a crack of a stone wall, to a flock of flying birds, or to a bee whizzing by. Like Oliver, these are the things in the natural world that fascinate me. For centuries people have looked to nature for signs, symbols, and answers. They believed that fields, trees, and creatures were
the spirits of their ancestors. There is an invisible energy, invisible to the eye but not to the soul, that can be felt in nature. An energy of reassurance, of cosmic connection, of lightness and of joy. An energy of all that matters is matter.

“Diary of a wildflower” is about this ~ this energy, this feeling.

It’s about the tangible, the intangible, the visible, the invisible, the seen and the unseen. These paintings are intimate, diaristic, imbued with my own personal symbols and yet I believe that you may find your own stories, signs and signifiers within these pieces.

My hope is that these paintings lift your spirit, that you can both find and lose yourself in them, in the same way that I do.