It's a bit ironic that almost exactly a year ago I was writing about a change of direction – and here I am, about to write about yet another change of direction! Although to be honest this change started to occur towards the end of last year. From this vantage point, 2022 feels like a bit of a pig's ear of a year. It wasn't the best. I didn't actually make very much work, and after creating a series of abstracts in the summer I really didn't do much at all. I got a bit lost. I just didn't know what I wanted to paint. It was bloody awful. I had a sense of dissatisfaction with my work, that it was lacking something. I didn't know what to say about it. So many times I thought 'that's it. I'm fucked. This is over for me'. I just couldn't imagine how things were going to get better. And of course the longer this went on, the more my confidence diminished and the worse I felt. It was profoundly uncomfortable. Why did I feel this way? I think we always, as artists, go through periods like this but what exacerbated things for me was a year of menopause-related mood swings, frequently plunging into black, sometimes suicidal moods, which had no pattern to them, no way of knowing when they'd happen or how long they'd last. So everything was just on such shaky ground, I didn't feel I knew who I was half the time. And of course, so much shit going down nationally and globally.
At some point towards the end of the year I started painting faces on small pieces of board. I'd had an inkling that I might want to revisit faces and figures (my work centred on figures for over 20 years, only stopping when I began painting in 2018). I had this nagging feeling that I wouldn't be able to say what I wanted to say in my work without them but I was slightly resistant to the idea too because I didn't want to go back over old ground. To begin with I felt frustrated by the fact that my faces looked exactly the same as they always did! You might think well, that's okay, isn't it? What's wrong with that?! But you know when you've got this thing tugging at your coat-tails, you can't ignore it. I suppose I wanted to feel like I'd progressed in some obvious way. I wanted it to look like I'd progressed. Anyway, I pushed myself to try different ways of doing the faces – using my left hand, using long brushes, deliberately making them different. In the end though, they just look like my faces because, well, that's my style! So I've calmed down a bit and accepted this fact, and got on with the painting. It gave me a buzz, painting these people, which I was massively grateful for because I thought I’d never feel it again. And I had the beginnings of a new path at last, I had somewhere to go.
When I was freezing my arse off on Exeter Christmas Market for nearly four weeks in November/December last year (sometimes I sell Viking drinking horns for a friend. Don’t ask.) some days were incredibly slow, so I did a bit of sketching, further exploring the idea of faces and also how I could blend them with text. I love words in themselves, doing what they’re supposed to do, but I also love how they can be used in a decorative way, the visual appeal to me is very strong. In particular, scratchy pen and ink writing, and stencilled or block printed letters. My desire to use text with faces and figures swings me back to some of my later embroidered pieces where I was doing a very similar thing. It wasn’t a deliberate decision, more of a subconscious pull - which is a gratifying thing, because it tells me that it’s something I need to do, that I’m not finished with that particular theme. Rather than feeling like I’ve come full circle though, I feel I’ve just looped back to pick up something that I left by the roadside for a while, and I’m now carrying that forward with the other things I’ve learnt along the way. More about where this is leading me next time!
