As a painter I have long been drawn by liminal spaces: the fertile ground between abstraction and figuration, between the material and the immaterial, the seen and the unseen. These are territories in flux, where things move tentatively, where light seems strangely alive and the unexpected hovers not far off.
The presence of threshold spaces in my paintings was not a conscious choice, but rather something that emerged naturally when I found a way of working that felt true to how I experienced landscape. I am drawn to that which barely appears, or is present only in traces, or hovers at the edge of perception - the moments before something becomes fully present or after it has almost dissolved. In the studio I slowly learned to attend to what was faint, half-formed, easily overlooked, and to trust that something real was there even before it had language or clear form.
The 15th century artist and writer Cennino Cennini put it like this: [The painter] must be endowed with both imagination and skill in the hand, to discover unseen things beneath the obscurity of natural objects, and to arrest them with the hand, presenting to the sight that which did not before appear to exist.’
I am writing at the heart of the month of February – a threshold month. The light is changing and the days are lengthening, but little has bloomed yet. Everything exists in potential, and is growing largely unseen.
Sitting here now I find myself thinking about what it means to have spent decades developing this particular form of attention – to the faint, the half-present, the not-yet-visible. It has been a training in a different kind of seeing, one that flows out of a desire to be present to what others might overlook or dismiss as nothing, whether that be in the world around or in the hidden parts of myself.
What seems fleeting and insubstantial can also be understood as something that has not yet been read with care - or something that has perhaps not yet allowed itself to be seen. For me, this mysterious and wondrous journey as a painter has always been (whether I knew it or not) about attending faithfully to what was actually there waiting to be seen. As GK Chesterton wrote, ‘Our perennial spiritual and psychological task is to look at things familiar until they become unfamiliar again.’
