A new way to paint.

At the beginning of this journey is a feeling of dissatisfaction with my art. I had been making increasingly abstract paintings inspired by the Dorset landscape. I wrote good explanations about what was behind them, that I was interested in ancient burial mounds as an act of memorial, that I was interested in manmade interventions in a natural space – but I couldn’t get the art to sing in the way that I wanted it to. I abstracted tumuli and field boundaries to become hard edged shapes, which worked logically, but in the end just didn’t feel exciting to me to paint.

I had started out painting quite impressionistically, with small thick brushmarks building up rhythms of colour, and I enjoyed doing that. The Dorset landscape did not invite that kind of painting, it presented me with flat areas of colour, shades of emerald green and brown and big pale skies. The landscape I saw led me to develop a style with graphic lines based on sketches and open spaces. It was a style I became reasonably good at, but it wasn’t the way I intuitively painted in the beginning.

My work at art college in Wales was full of dynamic marks tearing across large canvasses, full of colour and energy. When I looked at them I wanted some of that back. I had lost the excitement that I felt painting those pictures and the emotional connection to the subject.

When I wrote in art weeks brochure entries ‘I am inspired by the Dorset landscape’ – was that really true anymore? Had it ever been, or was I just looking for permission to paint something?

These are tough questions for me. I want to stand by my previous work, but I felt it was time to let it go. I had travelled as far down that road as I could and in order to go any further I had to change everything and find a new way to paint.

“And I just hope that you can forgive us, but everything must go” Nicky Allen Wire.