"Riding the Storm" Painting

I admire the human capacity for experiencing love, hope and joy even under very challenging circumstances and I tend to focus my work on these three themes. I paint dreamy, lyrical abstract paintings which are heavily influenced by the emotional content of my work as a psychotherapist.

People’s internal worlds have always intrigued me which drove me to re-train as a counsellor/psychotherapist in my early 40s. Having originally studied literature, I was interested in looking at different forms of expression – beyond language – for several years. The exploration of internal landscapes and emotional processes carried over for me in my practice as a mixed media, abstract artist. The world of therapy opened up a deeper exploration of instinctive and deeply personal processes that painting helped me to access. Concurrently, producing art became my own form of therapy. In my therapeutic work I discuss emotional states; in my art I aim to translate emotions into abstract, poetic, visual markers on canvas.

Art enables me to access my own embodied emotions that often escape intellectualisation. Painting is bottom-up processing rather than top down. I can discharge my emotions through the work on canvas or paper. Primary emotions such as sadness, terror or disappointment are often masked as secondary emotions, i.e. emotional reactions that we have in response to the primary feelings. Often the secondary emotion such as anger masks the underlying feelings that we experience originally. The process of painting often helps me to access these primary emotions thus having more understanding and choice in dealing with these hidden feelings.

In my recent series of work ‘Love Unbound’, I explore emotional responses to the theme of love: passion, joy, loss, wounding, desire, hope and romance. Love, arguably is one of the central themes of what it means to be human; most of our concerns are related to being loved, wanting to be loved or not having been loved enough. Art gives flesh to the experience of loving; in my art I attempt to capture the lyrical, soulful and painful aspects of this complex emotion.