All gone back to blue.

I’m starting to worry that although I have made breakthroughs about colour I’m really no closer to working out how I want to paint and what that’s going to look like. I decided to park colour for a while and concentrate on how I put the paint on. The marks that excite me are dynamic and immediate. I need to be more in the moment and present when I paint. I need to be more open to the call and response of the process - ‘I’ve painted that mark, so what’s next?’ I feel like I need to think less and feel more, and I can’t do that in technicolour yet, so I’m going to start with blue!

Why Blue? I have tried to do monochrome boards in black and white before but it didn’t really excite my soul. You can drown in grey. Blue is very amenable, it doesn’t clash with itself when you vary the temperature or the saturation and it’s reminiscent of a lot of things. Its going to let me do what I said I would do which is build the picture up mark by mark.

I worked only in blue for a few weeks, it was definitely something I needed to do. There are a lot of layers underneath. They went through many changes and I didn’t mind making them because I was involved in the process of responding to what was there and how it made me feel. I explored making different marks and found new ways to do it. This board, below, is a bit unresolved but it’s one of my favourites. I like the way the big grey mark sits on the surface in front of everything else - possibly because it’s warmer. I’m excited because I’ve never made a mark that looks like that before, and I learnt when something appears, not to tidy it away. Sometimes you can just let things be. I have learnt a lot from my blue boards which I hope I can carry on to whatever is next.