Pink Panel. An act of desperation

Mid-May and the weather feel stuck somewhere in late February. Grey mornings. Cold light. Sub-zero temperatures in the studio where even coffee seems slightly demoralised. I sat by my workstation the other day with absolutely no desire to paint, and no ideas what to paint either. A creative block accompanied by a mildly distressing feeling when your entire self-appointed career depends on producing stuff.

So, in an act of desperation I painted the entire panel bright pink. Not a subtle dusty pink. Not an elegant retrained pink. Proper synthetic, slightly obnoxious pink. Completely outside my normal palette, which usually lives in the colder territory of blues, greys, blacks, tension, pressure, containment.

And the pink worked instantly. Not because I suddenly discovered joy, but because it disrupted the paralysis. The panel stopped carrying an expectation of creating the next painting and become a problem to respond instead. “What, the hell, am I going to do with this now?” become an interesting challenge to solve, which resulted in producing “Fractured Ozone”.

Interesting lesson through: You don’t always think your way into the next work. Sometimes you have to wrong-foot yourself first. Part of my brain is already thinking if it would be fun to try lime green next …