Red velvet, rooster feathers and a shining blade

Things have been taking off this month, maybe not as quickly as I’d have liked, but the wheels are off the ground and I’m making a steady ascent. Shortly after I wrote my February blog, Studio 7 transformed into the set of something you might see in Game of Thrones. Red velvet, rooster feathers, a shining blade, blood (costume), warm light. With the help of the most talented Kate from Lovely One Photography, and Xavier and Stef from PS, I watched as the visual of a scene I’d imagined for several years was acted out on my workbench.

The next day the photos came through: Gorgeous golden light, the glint of silver, a blur of copper feathers, faces of rage, determination, urgency, terror, focus. The images told a centuries old story of revenge and justice, interlaced with new associations I’ve imprinted from my contemporary experience. It was Judith beheading Holofernes, but it was also a woman extinguishing her demons, a prisoner breaking free, a civilian executing a tyrant. The story is violent and universal, but it’s also quiet and philosophical.

These are the stories I love to tell in my art. They’re stories that make people think and reflect, but only after they’ve been confronted with immediate and powerful feeling.

In the studio with Stef and Xavier, shooting with Lovely One Photography for the next major painting

A painting like this calls for a large canvas – 140x100cm to be exact – which should fill a big gap on the walls of PS quite nicely for my show next year. But I’ve also been enjoying working on my miniatures this month (including one not much larger than a passport photo). Think of the miniatures as journaling, it’s a ritual of mental hygiene that I need to complete before I can focus on bigger and more complex storytelling. Alongside studio work this month, I’ve also completed a residency at Perth College, commenced a painting course with 11 students, all while confronting real grief and loss for the first time. It’s taken a lot of mental hygiene to make it through March.

Everything in life has an opposite and equal force, the dark and the light, the good and the evil, the micro and the macro, the sublime and the mundane. I value both in equal measure and the complex, wild scene of my next major painting tells a story of humanity just as valid as the mundane, daily realities of modern living. The mundane is the hidden, disguised, stored away emotion that we aren’t used to seeing on gallery walls, but it’s this that we feel most often, it’s the troughs experienced in-between the menacing peaks depicted in my major work.

Miniature painting allows me to invest all my feeling into a tiny space, it’s a mediative process. This piece is just larger than a passport photo.