Trying to be more consistent with posting and as I wrote I would post the stages of this painting, here is an early stage and a bit about why mark making is a fundamental love of mine. The earliest stage of a painting is where everything begins, I feel the blank canvas holds a strange promise and excitement for me. The moment I begin to make marks, there’s a physical sense of relief, releasing thoughts, emotions and internal chaos onto the surface where they can exist outside of me and begin to tell me what’s going on. When I mark-make, I might be telling a story or solving a problem. I might be reliving an experience or recording something I’ve noticed in the world. It’s a kind of non-verbal communication, a way of expressing feelings that don’t always have clear words or language.
Sometimes mark-making is a way through an overwhelming morass of feelings. With alexithymia, emotions can be difficult to name or untangle, but movement, texture and repetition on the surface of a canvas can become a path toward understanding them. The marks hold something that language can’t quite reach.
It’s also a space for investigation. Through marks I can explore a new idea, test a thought, or develop my understanding of the world and my place within it.
Much of my work is purely abstract. The marks don’t necessarily refer to objects, landscapes, or recognisable forms. Instead, they are intuitive, gestures, rhythms and layers that emerge through the act of making, am interpretation of how my brain might see something.
Over time these gestures become a kind of personal visual vocabulary. Lines, scratches, loops, smudges, blocks of colour, each mark carries a trace of movement, thought, and feeling. Layer by layer they build into the final piece.
The reel I’m sharing shows the early layers of a painting, not the very first one because I didn’t get to videoing that, so perhaps this would be the second mark making stage. At this point nothing is fixed, and everything is still possible, there is no concrete image in my mind, I’m simply playing with colours and lines here until I get that feeling or rightness both in myself and on the canvas. It’s simply still the beginning of a conversation between me and the surface.
For me, mark-making isn’t just a technique, it’s a crucial and possibly favourite part of my creative journey.
