The blue canvas with the interesting patina and abstract clouds has been drying since December and is now ready to be worked on. I think my paintings need time between sessions to assimilate themselves and decide where they want to go. I have to be patient with them. I added a red shape inspired by a smaller canvas, and things were going well until I got caught in a painting pothole and couldn't remember how I made the original pink. I am an intuitive painter, and colours often come about by accident. I might have had some blue left on the brush when I start mixing that pink. So it is impossible to recreate the exact colour, even if I could remember the amounts of paint I took from each tube.
I distracted myself with a blue wash of oil paint that travelled alongside an abstract Jacob's ladder for a while before making an impact on the smaller canvases, laid out underneath the easel to capture any runaway drips. I often place canvases under wet paintings. It's a way to capture the energy of those tiny impact marks, although I don't always keep them. This practice came from the early days in my career when I had to save on paint and was often painting in spaces where I wasn't meant to destroy the floor too much. In the end, the paintings in the studio restored my faith in the Goddess of Creativity and the God of Chance. I feel inspired to keep going.
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When flames and snakes are your neighbours, they can't help but be part of the story. This rough, heavy-duty cotton canvas has been in my studio for probably eight years. It was unprimed, so I spent months applying thin layers of oil paint before it went anywhere. I like the dryness that comes from all that soakage and the roughness of the surface. There were wildfires near the sea, and you could see the glow of orange at night in the distance. I was grappling with a shape similar to the one I am painting here back in Ireland. I tried it again when I got to Italy, but it wasn't until I saw the shape as a flame that it unlocked itself. On some of the smaller landscapes, these flames appeared …