This collection of paintings feels like it’s been a long time coming, even though I only started painting it in April.
There are a few reasons for that. The first is that the lockdown has stretched the last few months into an eternity. Everything feels slower and like it’s taking forever to happen. And that has its ups and downs.
The second is that the idea for these paintings has been bouncing around in my head since last October when I finished the “Letter to You” paintings and knew I wanted to take another stab at abstract, multimedia landscapes.
The third is that I bought the canvases for this collection during the January lockdown and really had planned to start them back then. Of course, things opened up and life sped back up to real time and I had to set them aside.
So, really, I’ve been working on this particular dream for almost eight months. Between imagining how they would work, planning out the shapes and sizes, naming the pieces, buying the paper and gold leaf I’ve painted into each one, buying the canvases, getting to work creating them, drying them, finishing them, photographing them, and now writing about them, these paintings have been on my mind often and for a long time.
It feels wonderful, knowing all this, to be finally presenting them to you.
I’ve been sharing them on my Facebook and Instagram pages and it’s meant so much to me to see you embrace them so warmly.
The pinks are such happy colours, the purples too. And while there are hints of blues and greys in a few of them, these paintings really embrace my favourite colour. They are happy pieces, hopeful pieces.
While no single painting is based on a single reference photo, all of them are imagined realities based on the series of pink horizon lines that I’ve been collecting through the winter months. The sky does something different in the cold months, with the angle of the sun just right, and it creates a magical travelling point to a place of warmth and light.
I feel like hope for good days lies at the pink horizon, and I wanted to capture that with the gold leaf in each piece. That sweet spot where maybe our lost loved ones visit us, or where maybe we can feel the start of our future unfolding.
It’s hard to put into words the way these skies, and by extension these paintings, make me feel. (Which, for me, is saying something!) They’re at once nostalgic and beckoning back to something I used to know and calling me onward into the future.
It’s a transition point, the horizon at dawn and dusk. And I feel like my life is at a transition point right now. Between love and loss and grief and something new that is coming that I don’t fully understand just yet.
Maybe you know what this feels like. This sense of being on the cusp of something. Being in a state of limbo that doesn’t feel wrong or like you’re waiting, but rather like you’re just about to see the sun burst from behind a cloud and feel the warmth of it on your skin.
That hopeful anticipation is what I’ve tried to capture in these paintings. That future that’s waiting for us all. That thing we’re striving toward. Because we’re all, I think, working on a dream.