I’m an outsider artist, which means I've never studied art or an arts degree. In fact my path into art is late-flowering, circuitous. I've always been obsessed with abstract paintings, interviewing abstract painters for my spiritual arts magazine MONK, putting their paintings on the frontispiece. One day my artist friend Cornelius suggested that I should stop interviewing all these artists and just start painting myself. ‘Just start your own practice, see where it goes, what arrives. Maybe you've got a calling.’
My first paintings were small-scale on paper, in watercolor and pastel. But always fluid abstract movements. I painted at home but quickly longed for a studio. I wanted to paint big, make a mess. Paint bold. I chose acrylics. (I love acrylics). Something deep was rising in me, some force that wanted to speak. The whole painting process was immediately compelling, mysterious.
When I paint there is only me and the colours that speak to me and the sky above and the ground below
Increasingly I feel abstract painting can be a language returning us to a wholeness, to a light we may have forgotten
I didn't have the courage to do it, so I asked for a sign. Then a girlfriend I hadn't heard from for years phoned me up saying she'd seen my paintings on social media and could she buy one? Here was my sign.
I rented a studio in the old artist quarter of Hove in Sussex, a disused stable block complete with mice, leaks, nesting pigeons... I remember thinking, how is this going to work? But then - I just started to paint - big.
The first series was wild, wilful, complex colour weaves that settled to compositions, meditations in shape and structure and colour. I was also involved with a shamanic circle in this period, doing much inner journeying, through drum work, trance, meditation. I think it fed into the whole experience.
That was three years ago.
I make these points because for me painting has not been a career path or an orthodox arts training but a journey, a way of being - joyful, involving, evolving
I feel like a child when I paint, before the adults came and stole that world away
I make these points because for me painting has not been a career path or an orthodox arts training but a journey, a way of being - joyful, involving, evolving. It does not have the weight (or the judgement) of my journalism career, is lighter, brighter. When I paint there is only me and the colours that speak to me and the sky above and the ground below. How freeing is that? I feel like a child when I paint, before the adults came and stole that world away.
And I feel led by paint – by colour – as if a painting knows, even before you've painted it. In this way, my friend Cornelius was right, painting is a calling. Something deep arises and leads me. I call it my painting animal – a luminous force: I trust it totally. Something I've forgotten. Leading me, wishing me whole – what Clarissa Pinkola Estés calls the river beneath the river.
Colour speaks to colour, shapes arise, conflict, deter. Verticals jostle. Then suddenly there is harmony - a beauty, some deep resonant visual satisfaction between form and colour
A lot of my time I spend looking. I can look for hours. I can wait days! Colour speaks to colour, shapes arise, conflict, defer. Verticals jostle. Then suddenly there is harmony - a beauty, some deep resonant visual satisfaction between form and colour. It’s like learning a language, gaining fluency.
I might paint on a painting over weeks until I arrive at this sweet spot - or it arrives to me. It means my paintings have a weight to them, an energetic weight as well as a physical presence in their thick impasto pigment. There's a conversation recorded, strongly told.
And I feel led by paint - by colour - as if a painting knows, even before you’ve painted it
In this way my paintings are becoming mysterious psychic-lands, maybe even lands of my childhood, re-aligning me with a joy and light I left behind through childhood traumas. Increasingly I feel abstract painting can be a language returning us to a wholeness, to a light we may have forgotten – the light of the soul, the light of our childhood. Something like that. Something quite mysterious and wonderful. In pigment, in colour…
As told to Alexander James
To read the online issues of MONK, click here
