Water, in its many forms, has always been a central and recurring theme in my paintings: streams, ponds and rivers, reflections, mist, cloud and rain, ice and snow, and the ocean itself. That ancient conversation between land and sea, and all the ways water has shaped, and continues to shape, the landscape.
Then there are the remarkable ways water interacts with light, creating those seemingly transcendent optical phenomena that arc across our skies: rainbows, fog bows, cloud bows, parahelia, lunar and solar halos. The dance between water and light has long been an endless fascination for me.
The water cycle itself feels like a profound metaphor for life. Just as water evaporates from the ocean through the warmth of the sun, condenses into clouds, falls to the earth as rain or snow, and finds its way back to the sea through streams, rivers and estuaries, so too are we “scooped up from a vast ocean of love and cast upon the hillsides, to wend our way down through every possible obstacle, trial and test,” and eventually return to the source from which we came.
Rilke captures something of this mystery in The Book of Hours:
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.
Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,
streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.
For many years, I found myself emotionally frozen. Not consciously, but as a kind of survival strategy. On the surface, I may have appeared composed, even serene, yet much of my inner world had been locked beneath the ice.
Paradoxically, it was in the Arctic — that place of frozen oceans and monumental stillness — where I began to thaw. The vastness, the light, the profound quiet of that landscape opened something in me. Looking back, I can now see that as a time when something shifted, softened, and began to flow again.
That experience gave me new eyes for the water I had so often painted. Not just as a physical presence in the landscape, but as an emotional one; as feeling itself.
Water is such a powerful metaphor for emotion, for the deep, fluid undercurrents that move below the surface of our lives. Though this is a relatively new insight for me, it casts a fresh light on why water has always drawn me in so strongly.
A few weeks ago, I came across a line in Environmental Arts Therapy and the Tree of Life by Ian Siddons-Heginworth, a book I’ve been working with over the past two years. He spoke of “the vast and watery worlds of feeling.” As I read those words, it suddenly dawned on me that it is those very worlds I have been painting for nearly forty years.
He also writes:
"At the heart of all feeling is love. There is no anger, no sadness, no guilt and no fear that does not hold at its core this most sublime of all human emotions."
Those words speak to something I’ve long sensed but perhaps hadn’t quite articulated — that the emotional resonance in my paintings might, at its core, carry this same undercurrent of love.
Yes, my work is about silence and stillness. But beneath that stillness is feeling. In a culture so preoccupied with doing, thinking, building, achieving, I believe there’s a quiet revolution in simply being and feeling — and in making space for those feelings to be held. Tenderly. Patiently. Without need for explanation. And then released.
Art has its part to play in that gentle shift toward a world where doing and feeling are more in balance. It begins with the individual... and ripples outward.
Over recent months, several people have spontaneously remarked on how much feeling or emotion my works hold, even the simplest of prints. At first, I was surprised, and not quite sure what they meant. But the more I sit with a painting once it’s complete, quietly present with it in the studio, or years later in the house, the more I realise how much emotion is there. I feel it in my body, sometimes quite powerfully. So perhaps it’s not surprising that others sense it too.
And maybe that’s where the real work of art begins. Not in the making, but in the meeting and being met.
