Photo by Street Art Atlas
I think the next thing I need to do in this blog is to explain my change in painting style that has happened in the last few years. After everything that happened in the previous blog, I found myself really not enjoying work. Whether painting in the studio or murals. I started to really resent the lack of meaning that I felt my work had and it seemed like I was just repeating the same process over and over again. Paint a colourful background, then paint the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the hair in black and white over the top and repeat. I decided that if I wasn’t enjoying doing the thing I love to do the most anymore then I needed to do something about it. I knew that I wanted to try something new, but that I still wanted to paint portraits. I also knew that I wanted the work to at least have more meaning to myself.
The logical step seemed to be to start painting in colour which was something I hadn’t really done since school. I told everyone I knew I was taking a ‘sabbatical’ as I didn’t know what else to call it and started to practice. After all the frustration in not enjoying painting and dealing with everything that was going on in my life at the time it felt good to push myself. I ended up spending pretty much a year working out what I wanted my work to be like and then a global pandemic and countless lockdowns gave me plenty of time to work it out. Eventually I started to plan a body of work and decided I wanted to try and explore the theme of loss and grief through the work. It took a long time to get to that decision but now feels like it makes so much sense.
Photo by Streets Dept
There was a period where I had really gone off my old work and couldn’t see it in any positive way. Now it just feels like part of a progression. I had some great times painting the old stuff and in hindsight some of it isn’t that bad! I also think the classic feeling of never being happy with anything you do gets in the way a lot. I’m really enjoying working in my new style, it gives me a lot more freedom to paint in different ways and it has meaning to me which means even if I’m not fully happy with the finished painting at least it has that!