Backyard Painting

The drying skin of a passion fruit, clouds, a moorland scene, or a decomposing apple are some of the many things that inspire me. In my current project the visual inspiration of rotting fruit provides a metaphor for the narrative of ‘Desolation’ (Isaiah 13:20-22), while a local park with its trees, pathways, lambs and surrounding moors and farms were the inspiration for the theme of ‘Established’ (Isaiah 14). My background in healthcare has on this occasion influenced my use of colour, with the hues and tones of the human body in sickness and death being used to communicate the descriptions of desolation and death in the opening chapters. It’s been a new and exhilarating challenge to read the text and paint a response. I’ve found my endurance has been stretched, particularly when the passages are bleak and sombre, and I have had to work harder to sustain a thought or an impression and transfer it into paint. The process has felt like research as I try to understand the emotional, spiritual and intellectual layers contained within the text and then interpret it visually. My aim has been to convey some echo of the beauty, vibrant playfulness and resonance that I admire in the works of great artists like Giacometti, Auerbach or Picasso, or the dark themes of absence, remembrance and grief in Kiefer’s powerful painting Shulamite.