Use your grief
This painting came out of the live performance drawings I was doing with musicians in May and June.
Around the same time, I was having conversations with various people about grief. It wasn’t something I sought out - it just happened that several of the performers I was drawing talked about loss that they had experienced. And at the same time a friend contacted me about a commission to remember her father who died last year, and I spent time with another friend who had also lost a parent.
What struck me was that the grief they felt wasn’t expressed negatively. There was pain there, for sure, and layers of sadness that clouded their memories. But also there was the sense that the pain of loss can sometimes be an energising force, something that shakes you from your inertia. It can prompt reflection about your own place in the world, where you have come from, where you’re going. Some of the performers acknowledged their grief on stage, sharing it with the audience - a moment of extraordinary vulnerability and strength. For the audience, emerging from our pandemic-stricken isolation, the live performance opened up a shared sense of emotional catharsis.
These ideas were playing in my head while I made this painting. While you’re absorbed in non-verbal activity, your subconscious can turn things over and reform them in different ways. Some of that process emerges into the shapes and colours on the canvas - the tension between movement and restriction, tightly bound energy and uncontrollable release. I’ve always found art and music can navigate those areas that words can’t reach - the intangible, complicated stuff.
