Misery and Art 3

Despite my theory about art and misery being connected sometimes pain is too hard to express at the time. Certainly when my Mother died in 1997 I stopped any kind of creative work and it was not until much later that I started to paint again. I did write some (very bad) poetry at the time in an effort to express how I was feeling and images from that still remain with me - perhaps one day they will make it into my art work. "I wrap the house around me, like a cloak" is one line I remember....

Likewise when my marriage broke up at the beginning of 2005 the urge to create left me for a time - I did do some 'deconstruction' of a nude portrait I had painted of my ex-husband but I don't think that counts! But a year or so on I started a 'putting it back together' theme which I quite literally pieced together from bits of my life (the piece to the left is called - strangely enough 'Putting it back together again'). The works were painted on collaged canvas - the collage is found paper which included old sketches, receipts, notes and bills - detritus of my life basically.

Creating the surfaces was very relaxing and quite meditative and the images on top in this case were drawn with Indian ink. The figures are all based on myself (droopy bits and all).

The next painting 'Restoration' was much more literally a painting, still using Indian Ink but also with white acrylic paint. This one lost the freshness of the ink that I so liked and I struggled between the desire to be graphic and the desire to be painterly in the features of the face. It nevertheless remains one of my most favourite works - I think I captured the expression of the face that I so wanted to express, that mixture of sadness and hope that drove me to create the work in the first place.