In June 2020, I set out to paint a large landscape which reflected my experience of the Covid 19 pandemic. When it was finished, it struck me a brash, as a piece with lots of contrasts but no clear focus. I found it hard to look at and dismissed it as an ugly experiment.
Nevertheless, I kept it, considering it a true reflection of my experience of the lockdown where too many things were forcibly mixed together and I lost my focus in dealing with the day day-to-day of looking after two small kids.
Months later in November, I got it out and started to look at it in more detail. I saw beauty in the detail.Were before I had been trying to take in the whole panorama at once, now (with some distance) I was able to appreciate small parts of it.
As I stared to mask off bits and decide what to use, I realised that most of it could be salvaged, that by cropping the image in different ways I could capture its beauty. So I set about cutting it up and laboriously mounding the different sections.
The result is a set of 22 paintings, beautiful in their different ways, reflecting feelings of hope within a dark time.
These paintings will be available on my website at a reduced price, in the hope that they will travel to different parts of the world and act as a reminder to their owners to focus when they can on what is possible from here and to find the beauty in a seemingly ugly panorama.