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“No man is an island,” wrote the poet John Donne. I would add: no island is an island. Nature does not exist in isolation. It’s birth, evolution and daily chimings are dependent on the greater nature beyond our planet’s fragile borders. My mind wonders to the numinous thought espoused by the science of quantum biology that mutation in the genes of life-forms on earth could have been triggered by the sun’s rays affecting the way DNA copies itself in terrestrial veins. So the random mutations that lead, through non-random ways, to our very existence, could have come from the very fingertips of our star.
Aesthetically, too, nature is wedded to the cosmos. The colours of the sky, of plants, of the sea, of the rainbow, all of them, are dictated by the cosmos that veils our planet. And I can think of no greater masterpiece than a tower of starlight in free-fall over a tundra or a great lake. All we can do is be humble and get into that ring of beauty, see what we’re made of – literally.
You can learn more about my cosmic nature paintings here.
Some artists are like Bansky. A spectre flitting in and out of the public eye, full of mystery, but empty of identity apart from what their art projects.
And then there’s the other end of the artistic spectrum, the Picassos, the Dalis, those that make it a point to share their personal lives as much as their art. In both cases, these guys create a story around themselves which is rich, complex, often disturbing, sometimes scary, full of emotion.
I never expected to make many stories out of my art that were too much about me, in the most direct sense of the word. I’ve always talked about my art for what it is; my awe and passion for all things nature, my shrewdly optimistic, David Attenborough-narrated view of the world.
But a chronic illness can somewhat change your perspective. Of yourself, which ultimately changes your perspective of your art.
I have endometriosis. For those lucky enough to have not heard of this, endometriosis is when the lining of the uterus starts to grow in places where it shouldn’t – essentially, all over your reproductive organs, pelvic organs, nerves, whatever happens to be in the way. Each month these growths bleed, build up, bleed, build up…it’s terribly painful, trying, frustrating and unfortunately pretty incurable.
Having a chronic illness changes your perspective about yourself. I feel as though I’ve learned more about the person behind the easel, as well as the way the rest of the world looks at you. It’s about learning to live in a slightly different way than you lived before. I guess what I’m trying to say is that painting and endometriosis, for me at least, have a lot in common.
It’s deeply personal
Everyone’s symptoms are different. Pain is felt differently and in very different ways. One person’s ‘mild’ is another’s ‘severe’. Art is the same; one person can be moved to tears by a portrait, whilst the other seeks reprieve in a sultry abstraction. My pain feels so deeply personal to me, that it’s extremely difficult to explain to an outsider. My painting is the same. This is just the way it is.
It has good and bad days
Ever thrown in the towel after a few brushstrokes, having sat yourself down with the perfect composition, the perfect lighting, perfect colours, only to find that it just isn’t working? It’s the same with endo. Some days you’ got it, some days, it’s got you.
It defines us, as much as we try to define it
Painting is a huge part of my life and who I am. Would I be a painter if I didn’t grow up surrounded by pets, nature documentaries, visiting zoos, animal parks and eating books and encyclopedias? Would I still own cuddly toys of my favourite animals? Would I still watch Tales of the Riverbank, if I wasn’t a painter? Probably not. It’s all a neatly-wrapped, sometimes overflowing parcel. Trying not to let a chronic illness define you is the same; why aren’t you having that drink, why are you choosing not to go shopping, why are your high heels gathering dust, why are you taking the car everywhere…
It makes beautiful artwork
I have to thank my endometriosis, as it gave my the courage to keep on painting and trying new directions, even when I was at my lowest, when the pain was so bad that bed was my only weekend retreat. But I knew that I loved painting, and I couldn’t let it go to waste. I still had ideas I wanted to throw on canvas, techniques to try. So I adapted my studio, more than my mind. Painting standing up becomes a stool, or placing a canvas at floor height so I can sit in front of it. Marathon painting sessions happen on a weekend, when I can rest and complain of my aches afterwards. It’s all changed, but it’s still the same person painting.
To see more of my paintings, click here
The more we talk about art, and endometriosis, the more understanding we will have of both. But right now, I’m going to leave you with some very useful resources for endometriosis. Have it? Well then you’ll have read all of these and more. Think you have it? Please read on. Know someone who has it? Take it in, listen to them. And give them a gentle hug.
Endohope – a fantastically real, down-to-earth and honest account of Endometriosis, with plenty of resources and research to boot.
Bloomin’ Uterus – a touching and open blog full of incredible stories, fantastic research and very real details.
Endometriosis UK – some of the more accurate and up to date information on this condition.
Endo Support Group, Malta – an inspiring and amazing group of women, some beautiful empathetic and kind-hearted women.
The Endo Wall – a beautiful art and Endometriosis project in Cardiff. One woman’s mission to raise awareness, encourage sharing and to give a big f*** you to the doctors that told her it was “all in your head”.
Thanks for reading! x
The lights we see from stars and planets emit a beautiful array of colours. But light isn’t just about illumination. Light is the very DNA of a celestial body’s chemical make-up. By using spectroscopy, astronomers can deduce what elements are present on a planet or star. Each and every element in the universe, when burned, gives off a unique set of colours. And these are the same anywhere across the vast universe. Strontium is a reddish purple. Sodium is yellow. Potassium is lilac. Copper is blue. And so on.
If you look at a rainbow, you are also looking at the chemical make-up of our own sun. Our sun is about 70% hydrogen and 28% helium – which isn’t surprising, because those two are the most common elements in the universe. And as you can imagine, for a painter, knowing that colours play such an important role in the decoding of the universe – colours are essentially the bar codes of existence – is a great inspiration. So when you look at the night sky, and you paint it, you pay very careful attention as to what each and every colour you’re using actually means.
Colour then, is the language of the universe. The phrase ‘the music of the spheres’ should be redundant – the universe is quiet, but it has some very loud colours!
You can learn more about my cosmic nature paintings here.
Unless you’ve lived in a hole for the last 48 hours, you’ll know that the United States hosted a magnificent and rare spectacle yesterday; the first total eclipse in the region in 99 years.
As the earth went eerily still, eerily cold and so rapidly dark, the moon made its debut – obscuring the sun like a giant 8 ball blocking a cosmic snooker pocket. Glasses off, but only for a fleeting moment. The moon gave the sun its diamond ring – then, glasses back on, and all of a sudden the light returned, like the sheets being pulled from your morning slumber.
People laughed, they gasped, they screamed, and they cried. What is it about this unique and extraordinarily precise phenomena that moves us in such a way? Is it the shock to our circadian rhythm, is it our fear that the sun may not peep out the other side? I witnessed a partial eclipse in the UK in 1999, and was glued to live streams yesterday. From the other side of the world, I was hooked.
A Great Eclipse Painter
A secondary source to my eclipse inspiration came from the works of a painter I’ll admit I stumbled across by chance (thank you, News Feed!). If you haven’t heard of Howard Russell Butler, and you love art and eclipses, you’re missing out.
It’s not simply that he painted beautifully serene and emotive paintings of eclipses and other cosmic scenes, as well as landscapes. His works are beautiful in themselves, but what I find most remarkable as how he managed to plan out and sketch his eclipse paintings in 110 seconds. Once he caught his eclipse, he scribbled furiously, coming up with exceedingly complex values and mathematical symbols for the different hues of the light, the corona and the beads. All this, whilst the picture in front of him vanished.
Find out more about his amazing works
From art to photography to fashion, weirdly ridiculous and indeed mind-numbing flat-Earth theories, eclipses have inspired us for centuries. As an artist, I see great potential in this subject, and plan to take full advantage of its publicity 🙂
I had started painting the stunning California Condor some time ago, and then, inspired to paint an eclipse, I found that the two would fit together perfectly.
Just like a total eclipse, the California Condor is a rarity, too, as one of the world’s most endangered birds, an enduring Native American symbol, brought back from near extinction by an expensive and dedicated conservation and breeding project. This magnificent bird is surviving, but by no means thriving.
I’m definitely going to work on another eclipse piece, but I’m waiting for the Muse to strike first! I have a few ideas…
Appreciate the rare things. Love them.
A painting is like an investment. Sometimes, your investment pays off, landing you wealth, happiness and a tidy sum for the future, and sometimes, it doesn’t. Whether its down to a bad decision, an unstable market, or perhaps just bad luck, you can’t always predict whether your investment is a ‘sure thing’.
It’s exactly the same with painting. Now, I may know nothing about investments, but I know a fair bit about painting. And what I’ve come to realise is, no matter how much you paint over it, how much you fight with it, sometimes a painting will fail, and you won’t immediately know why. Given the time, energy and money that you’ve put into a painting, from sketching away furiously to scribbling down notes, mixing and discarding colours and sweating at your easel, to finding that the fruits of your labour have failed can be a damn hard feeling to swallow. If a painting is going badly for me, you’ll know about it. Even the dog will know about it.
I have discarded numerous paintings over the years, probably more in the last two years than the previous six combined. Not because I’m becoming a worse painter (far from it, I hope) but because I’m becoming more selective about the paintings that I carry to full term. Many others transform into experiments, giving me the freedom to try out a new style, a new mix or brushstroke when I cannot get a clear idea in watercolour, or as a sketch.
You can learn a lot from paintings that fail; from why that colour mix didn’t work, or why that composition looks so….wrong. It’s all research, warming you up for the next one.
I thought I’d talk about this in more detail, by sharing with you a few of my recent failures, and why I think they went wrong.
(Also, if you’re anything like me, you won’t have kept much of a photo record of the failures!)
Lack of Coherency
I love the idea behind this one; the intention was to create a big, rich, forested scene with the deer merging into his background, in a similar vein to my Palaeolithic Inspired paintings. The composition is dominant, it works, but I didn’t define the planes and the lines clearly enough before I started, so what should have been a coherent abstract/cubist canvas became a busy, cluttered mess.
No Planning
I had the vision of painting Malta’s national bird, the Merill, or Blue Rock Thrush, in a paint-by-numbers style – letting each colour sit beside each other with a subtle shift in value to create a flat yet rich painting. Yet I didn’t know what I would do after that. I used to love paint by numbers, but when you have to choose the values and draw all the little shapes, it’s not so easy! At this early stage, I have to admit I loved this painting. Then, I got stuck – I didn’t know how to get my rocks to look like rocks, and I feared that the feathers would lose their effect the more I painted. I think I painted over him now, but I’m not sure. I will try him again one day soon.
Painting Under Pressure
Never, ever go and paint live without a plan. Granted, the passers by were thrilled watching me paint as I threw colours here, and there, and here again during a Notte Bianca event in Malta’s capital city of Valletta. But I didn’t know where I was going; it was dark, uncomfortable, I was painting out of my comfort zone, trying not to spill paint on a 16th Century floor. If you’re going to paint live at an event, or for charity, or go plein air, make a sketch beforehand, start putting some colours down a few days before. Get the basics in, and know where you’re going before you arrive.
Thanks in no small part to these three pieces, painted between 2015 to just a couple of months ago, I’ve learned to plan my paintings better. In fact, I would say that I paint less now, as I spend a good month or so gathering resources, backtracking on ideas, scribbling notes, snippets for blogs, taking photographs and producing concepts and colour sketches. Planning takes away some of the trepidation of diving in head first, even though often the temptation to just plunge in and start painting is overwhelming. Don’t do it!
So there you have it, three reasons why I think many painting, including my own, fail. What are your thoughts on paintings that you feel didn’t turn out like you expected, or those that ended up being the underlayer to an entirely new piece?
Ever since I was a little girl the aesthetics of the universe had a Sisyphean hold on me. I owned many big books and encyclopedias about astronomy, where I was amazed by the way galaxies whirled and how bright and colourful nebulae always were. I looked at the planets on our solar system and learned their Roman names. Saturn’s rings, in particular, reminded me of a princess wearing her crown. And Jupiter – the king of all gods, isn’t he? – always looked pissed off to me.
I had lost that connection with astronomy as I grew up and nature – earth’s nature – took more of a hold on me. But by a personal Darwinian evolution I went from religiously watching David Attenborough documentaries to watching Professor Brian Cox. Attenborough’s natural heir. He re-kindled my infantile passion and sense of wonder at the great beyond. His Wonders series are a masterpiece in themselves. And when I feel that mixture of awe and curiosity the only way I can subdue that wonderful itch is to paint.
You can learn more about my cosmic nature paintings here.
