Look Up and Feel Free Painting

‘Look up and Feel Free’, is about that feeling that you get when you look up and realise that the vast space you can see above you, is inside you also. It makes you feel lighter and puts you in touch with the present moment. ‘Look up and Feel Free’, is a painting from a body of work called, ‘Coming Alive’. The collection was created in 2018/19 and was exhibited at Linlithgow Burgh Halls near Edinburgh at the end of 2019. For many years, I have sketched following my daily meditation routine, creating odd and often distorted creatures that come streaming to mind as soon as my pencil hits the paper. In the spring of 2018, I decided to bring these characters to life, creating a unique world that is as strange as it is familiar. I felt compelled after giving birth in 2017 to breathe life into these unborn creatures: that are filled with all the same fears, passions and flaws as anybody else. They may be messengers of my subconscious giving me insights into the human condition and myself. I work with layers of plaster because this process and the artworks themselves then have a sense of the primitive, giving the feel of pictograms or petroglyphs of ancient caves. I make marks into the plaster with, various utensils, forcing myself to be spontaneous as the final layer of plaster dries rapidly. It commands me from the start not to be too precious and to let my pieces take on their own life.