The secret gallery’s blog

First post of the secret gallery

I am going to get back to painting. I look at the start I made on a small canvas, it looks sort of like a boat with a sail, at this stage, I have no idea where it will finish. Somewhere in college I learnt that painting was supposed to be hard and a struggle, and through this struggle something really new and fresh would be created. I have also heard that it should flow and be natural and honest and that the easy part of an artist’s job should be actually making the art, the harder part being the business side of it. I somehow manage to believe in both of these polarities at the same time! All I will say is, its a kind of dark journey, magical a scary!

I approach each painting kind of like the first one that I have ever painted, it is a strange dialog between me and it, often changing from playful and childlike to calm to frustrated to angry to poetic, inventive or whatever is passing through. I allow myself to forget so I can remember how to paint in a new way, I try to keep it fresh.

As a very dear friend of mine said to me, ’emotions are messy, there is no tidying and cleaning them up neatly into compartments’. I feel like that about art too. So I am off now to explore in the messy medium of oil paint.