With added relish

Over the past month, my painting journey has involved not only painting every single day, but also an awful lot of thinking about art and talking about art and then thinking some more about art. A cycle of thinking and talking and writing, with intense burst of painting mixed in. It has been a head-bending time, as I've grappled with concepts that I have both never considered and avoided, as well as creating paintings that I had never expected to. I've uttered surprising statements and watched amazed at some of the shapes flowing under my brushes.

Those brushes have become notably freer too, perhaps even more painterly, as I move further and further from my controlled, graphic nature. I've become more familiar with my materials, with the various consistencies and tones of my acrylics and the way their mixed pigments split in water. I've also began to re-discover materials I had not used in many years – pastel, oil pastel, oil sticks and hard pencils – which I have been adding to those acrylics to give texture, depth and shape.

My goal in all this is to capture something of the changes to my manner of thinking, my manner of perception, that I have spent the last few years working to alter to the positive. The underlying framework for each piece therefore becomes an interpretation of how I see the world and myself, of the past, the present and the future. More specifically, the pieces become a reflection of my state at the moment that my brushes, pencils, rags, roller and pastels move on the paper.

The three pieces I am sharing today, all as yet unnamed, are the first three finished paintings I have completed to my satisfaction in quite some time. It is only this week that I feel I have finally got to where I wanted to get and that, right now, is only the beginning. I do not know what will come next but I am looking forward to it with relish.