Discovery, experimentation, past, future, open-minded, growth, passion, communication, colour, fear.

Above are ten words and an image that describe my practice. ‘Discovering’, ‘experimentation’, ‘future’ and ‘growth’ relate to the idea of hope. This is something that is a strong trait within my practice. I have hope that I’m insanely proud of my next piece, and that my techniques will evolve and become a stronger version of what I already create.
This shows through the image. The photo of a work-in-progress self-portrait painted in Gouache onto sketchbook paper shows the many layers of skin tone as well as the still plain paper. This could be a metaphor; sometimes a concept entices me and I spend hours on it, but other times I have trouble – much like a writer’s block.

I see myself as someone who wants to learn new things and grow from them, thus why I describe my practice as being ‘open-minded’. However, there is a strong ‘fear’ of failure, anxiety and paranoia that sometimes knocks me back and convinces me to stay in my comfort zone and to not branch out and try new techniques. This is also apparent in the image as, I have created many a painting onto paper with Gouache paint, and I was too scared to try out oil painting at that moment in time.

‘Past’, ‘future’, ‘passion’, ‘communication’ and ‘colour’, are words that I picked to describe my practice because they are what I aspire to. I want to learn from my past so that my future is brighter and I want to create art that ignites a passion in both myself and the onlooker through my version of visual communication and colour.