A year of stars - painting what I wanted

For the past year I've done very little of my seascape painting, deciding instead to follow my heart and really concentrate on the star paintings. This was a risk, with no galleries to show them and not much track record. While the 12"x12" Light series was the birthplace of the star paintings - the stars becoming an extension of that series - they were always shown alongside Coast paintings. As was fitting, since they began as an exploration of light reflections in the water.

The freedom of being in Yorkshire fed my desire to give myself creative freedom. It's not that I don't love my landscapes, but they were feeling forced and stagnant. I knew something was changing with them but it's a strange time of evolution and so painting them was frustrating. The ones I did were entirely local - the "year-long" painting Selwicks Turn, and the set of Scarborough Coastival paintings.

But my concentration has gone to stars and light. Technically speaking, this will feed back into the coast paintings. Working on perfecting the glazing and blending of light even better than before. Working on an absolute simplicity of composition.

Along with the freedom to paint, I have the freedom to exhibit them in my own gallery! So the anniversary exhibition (one year! yay!) at Grejczik Gallery will be my Light paintings.

It's been a year of breaking away from the strict 12"x12" format I originally set myself. We artists like to give ourselves completely random rules!

So there are HUGE paintings like the 100cm x 120cm Electron Blue:

And the 100cm x 100cm Antares:

Plus the small 10cm x 21cm paintings on paper have been lovingly framed and look fabulous:

What is the result of all this? I'm working on new coast paintings. I've realised how to achieve the light I want but also realised I really really really really want LINE in the new paintings. As an artist, everything I do feeds everything else, though not always in the expected way.